Is there a way to run a KDE Plasma distro like Fedora entirely in RAM from a boot disk to watch HDR content?
I've been using Linux Mint exclusively for a year and a half now, and I've gotten pretty used to the ecosystem, but I don't want to have to wait another year for them to implement HDR support for video playback. I also don't want to go through the effort of fully swapping distros (don't have time to completely reorganize my workflow at the moment, etc.).
Does anyone have a recommendation for a distro that I could run in RAM from a USB stick with an up-to-date version of KDE Plasma or another DE when I want to watch HDR movies?
Or, if I'm overthinking this and there's another obvious, simpler solution, please feel free to let me know that as well.
Edit: I thought about running Alpine Linux in RAM, but I'd have to reinstall Plasma every time I rebooted since I'm pretty sure it doesn't come with a DE by default.
Edit 2: Thanks for all of the helpful comments everyone! For those asking, live USB are usually pretty slow and clunky in my experience when they run from the USB stick, and I wasn't sure if that would interfere with video playback.
I think I'm just going to try a KDE Neon live USB and see if I can get HDR video working that way, without trying to run it from RAM. Thanks again!
You know you can just install a distro to a usb stick like any other harddrive. Why the need to run it entirely in ram?
The only things that come to mind are anonymity and performance on very old hardware.
Fedora has a kernel parameter that makes it run in RAM. You just need to add
rd.live.ram=1to the kernel line in GRUB.There are three solutions to this problem :
Install KDE on Mint and select it at login
Since Mint 22 is based on Ubuntu 24.04, I'm pretty sure it only has access to KDE 5.7 in apt, not 6, so I still won't be able to use HDR.
Would this instruction work for you?
Grab two USB drives, flash Aurora on USB 1, install it to USB 2. Now you have a persistent, portable OS. If the USB drives are USB 3.0, they won't be slow.
I was immediately thinking about Suse Studio, but that service has radically changed since I last used it back in 2009/2010
Could you use Kodi?
What you could do is set up a chroot jail and use debootstrap to create a bootstrap system. Then put the sources.list for Debian Sid and run apt install kde-plasma-desktop
Mount /proc and /dev in the chroot jail.
Then go to a text terminal (alt-f3) and stop your login manager service.
Chroot into your debian sid chroot and start the x server with start (I think)
These steps might not work but it's kind of a roadmap of how i would do it.
I am not sure if your usecase can be fulfilled with
dristrobox, it may be worth to try