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I’m just asking this question. It may have been asked before but I’m asking this time to obtain further details. If I installed my Ubuntu from a laptop (Asus) to an external SSD, will I be able to boot this external SSD on other laptops and desktops alike?

If I had ticked the box ‘Install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware and additional media formats’ during installation, will this create complications? Right now, the Ubuntu external SSD I have has been installed from my laptop (Asus) which has intel graphics drivers and that Ubuntu always came with those as far as I’m aware of.

I’m also aware that I’ll be booting on computers with different hardware in which I hear Ubuntu will be compatible with 99% of the time unless I’m wrong. In case you ask, no I won’t be installing proprietary graphic drivers for every computer I boot Ubuntu from just to keep the compatibility unless it’s really safe.

Please ask if you need further details.

Toby
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No you can not use the same Ubuntu thumb drive to boot a computer with Arm processors, or one that does not meet hardware spec's, or is 32bit. The drive needs to be made BIOS/UEFI compatible to boot both BIOS and UEFI computers. This is not too hard to do:

Ubuntu on a USB stick - boot in both BIOS and UEFI modes

This works with SSD also.

The last time I checked Nvidia proprietary graphic drivers did not interfere when booting a computer without a Nvidia graphics card.

C.S.Cameron
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The standard ubuntu kernel will deal with the same broad AMD64 hardware as your first device. The boot loader is the other part of the puzzle, and it is actually the hard part to get right. You are right to prefer a real installation, not a 'persistent USB' installation.

I am going to assume that you have EFI on everything (all computers you want to boot), which is a good bet for hardware less than 8 years old or so.

I do what you are asking, and it works.

A couple of tips: a) Many USB sticks promise fast performance, but mostly that is rubbish when it comes to the workload of an OS. However, the Samsung USB C bars are quite good, I have a few test distributions installed on these and the performance is quite good. I doubt they will have a long and happy lifetime under load, but for mucking around and exploring they are good. I mention this is a cheap alternative to using a real SSD

boot-loader setup

b) For a fully self-contained experience, you want the boot loader on the USB device, not just the OS. There is unfortunately a bug in the ubuntu installer which ignores your request for it to do this, but the workaround is not too bad. See my 'tutorial' answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/1056079/152287

Tim Richardson
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A regular ubuntu intall to an external hard drive will not make the drive bootable. If the SSD is set up to be bootable, it should work. But you will still need to interrupt the BIOS boot process to tell your computer which drive you want to boot too. I'm assuming that you are using a USB SATA Adapter Cable. You can probably run a bootable flash drive installation to the external USB hard drive. You can also choose the install option to make a "persistent" bootable USB drive. But there are limitations to the bootable external drives. You'd learn if it's what you want to do by making a bootable thumb drive for experimentation. There are some great tutorials in Ask Ubuntu for making bootable flash drives..

Carl Ernest
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