Live MX Persistence on Ventoy

[thomasl]

I only want to keep a solid snapshot base which can be quickly returned back to after stepping off at a tangent for whatever reason, and the fact that you have actually already done something similar is quite a relief, cos it seemed like I was fighting a losing battle.
Might there be an example somewhere to help it make more sense ?

Well, in my case I have a directory /MXL which carries linuxfs and all the "normal" persistence files (ie my standard work environment). So for instance I wanted to test-drive a video editing software at some point and so I created a new directory /MXVTEST and copied my persistence files there. Then I added a new Grub entry to boot this by copying the existing entry and adding the pdir= boot option. Then I booted into that, installed the programme and checked it on and off for two weeks or so. Worked perfectly well. In this case I decided not to use the software so I just deleted the new directory. If I had wanted to keep it I would have copied its /home information back to my standard configuration and again installed it in my standard configuration.

@fehlixWell, my understanding (admittedly based on a thread from 2018) was that =pdir is indeed undocumented for MX and that this is on purpose.

[anticapitalista]

@fehlixWell, my understanding (admittedly based on a thread from 2018) was that =pdir is indeed undocumented for MX and that this is on purpose.

Why would it be 'on purpose'?

[Electroguard]

I am only just beginning to appreciate that MX and antiX seem to be two sides of the same coin, and where the naked raw power of antiX is enjoyed by antiX enthusiasts, that same power gets demurely dressed and hidden in MX to avoid frightening away us innocents... so maybe it was a deliberate MX K.I.S.S.

[thomasl]

@fehlixWell, my understanding (admittedly based on a thread from 2018) was that =pdir is indeed undocumented for MX and that this is on purpose.

Why would it be 'on purpose'?

I can't say for sure that pdir= was left undocumented on purpose for MX as I don't know anything about the MX devs' internal discussions WRT this.

However, as I said, there have been messages that at that time seemed to imply that this is indeed the case. See viewtopic.php?p=455498#p455498 and also messages #8 and #12 in that same thread.

[Electroguard]

Thanks for the helpful advice guys, I think I am making some headway with this.
pdir= pointed me in the right direction, and links pointing the way to relevant useful info caused me to explore the different menu'ed persistence options, which may have led me to stumble on a way to have different MX 'stages' easily right out of the box.

I don't understand the technical reasons yet (and perhaps never will), but I've noticed that choosing different methods of persistence actually stores different info.
Or put a different way... persistence changes done with one method may not get restored using a different method of persistence, but can be restored again using the original persistence method.
Which means that 2 different methods of persistence can save completely different configurations, users, apps, and even Live-usb-storage contents.

So this might be what I've been looking for, to give...
A stable minimum fully-configured 'base' which can be quickly reverted back to by booting live without persistence, and kept up-to-date by remastering.
A 'daily-driver' persistence which adds useful bloat such as wine and virtualbox and video apps etc when needed.
A 'test' persistence for exploring new stuff.

I need to more thoroughly explore the implications of the different persistence options first, but it's looking promising.