In my case, the problem was that the disk never showed up in the Fedora installer. I’ve quickly reproduced the issue in a VM (but I originally noticed it on bare metal):
As you can see in fdisk, the disk (/dev/sda) has been recognized correctly by the kernel and works as expected. But somehow the installer only shows the “internal” /dev/vda.
After some further investigation, this seems to be related to the specific USB drives. I tried three different ones. It failed on a USB stick and the original external NVME enclosure. However, it did accept my USB to SATA adapter. So I guess I could install Fedora on my 10-year old HDD… 😐
Ah, that would put a bit of complication into things. If you want to actually accomplish this though, you should largely start with the same steps as a standard system install, using a second USB flash drive to write the distro onto the external SSD, leaving enough space to build the rest of the partitions you need.
I’ve actually tried to install Fedora on an USB SSD to play around with it. But somehow the installer just refused to select the second USB drive as an installation target. I looked for quite some time but couldn’t find a way to do it. I ended up trying to install it manually like Arch (for fun), but never got a bootable system 😅 I was able to install Arch and NixOS on the same drive without issue.
I’m actually not sure how OP could achieve something close to what they’re looking for… A regular installation certainly seems like the right choice, but that may require using an internal drive.
Yeah, NTFS being the problem actually makes a more sense.
OP could also just use the fuse driver then. I’m using it on 5.15 (Linux Mint) and it works quite well. I only had problems when I tried to use it for a Steam library.
You could also try to switch the kernel version. Ubuntu 22.04 currently supports two different versions: 5.15 and 6.5, you could switch to the other one and see if the problem also occurs there.
Nah, it’s been upstream since RHEL locked down. Rocky’s been doing some funky stuff though.
AlmaLinux mostly ships packages that are maintained by Red Hat for RHEL, which is why I called it effectively a downstream. But maybe we can just agree that they’re related and it’s complicated 😅
Good thing there’s flatpak, snap, appimage, nix, guix, distrobox, etc. to keep you up to date. The question is then: do you mind if your DE and drivers don’t change for years. And that’s perfectly fine for a lot of people.
Yes, the situation has certainly improved, especially for GUI applications. But there’s always some trade-offs involved with those alternative packaging options. The nice thing is that you can freely choose if you want such a very-LTS option, or something fresher :)
AlmaLinux is effectively a downstream of RHEL, so it inherits a lot of RHEL’s pros and cons. I think, from a technical perspective, it makes a lot of sense for professional applications. It has a rock solid base OS that only changes rarely, which has lead to widespread support among professional (commercial) software. On top of that you get more regular updates to hardware support and (some) applications. You also get very long support times, which can make sense for some use cases.
On the hand, this model certainly also has its downsides. Towards the end of the life cycle, the packages get very old, especially the base OS (e.g. RHEL 7, which goes EOL this year, ships with gcc version 4.8). If you care about having the latest and greatest packages, this is not a distro for you. It’s also not clear if Red Hat will try to further crack down on their downstream distros…
Overall, I think it’s a good choice for a professional environment, where you don’t need bleeding edge packages. Some commercial software also doesn’t give you a lot of other options. For personal use, I’d probably look for another distro, unless you’re looking for a very slow update cycle.
Given that Fedora is a distro that aims to be on the frontier of new features and technologies, the inclusion of KDE seems like a much better fit than Gnome.