when will all software be portable??

[billdotson]

I have just gotten Opera, Firefox and Blender onto my flash drive and running portable.

How long do you think it will be before there is just a computer with an OS installed and there is just a USB drive you take and plug in and there is all your data, apps, drivers, etc.?

or do you even think it will get that way?

As of right now opera and firefox tend to open a tad slow but that is probably because they are on a flash drive.

[melancholeric]

Isn't DSL already like that? I heard you can just start it on windows from a USB stick. I might be wrong though.

[qalimas]

All Linux software already is.

All you need to do is create a custom live CD with all the programs you use, the proper configs to make it the theme you want. Then use a USB stick for data or use it as your home folder.

So you wouldn't even need a harddrive, just a CDROM drive and a USB port.

[PriceChild]

I can't remember the site now... but Hobbsee showed me this cool app which lets you put things like firefox and loads of other apps from disc... keeping your security and preferences.

If I remember/find it again I'll edit this post :)

(btw it was a windows xp thing )

[Tomosaur]

All programs are portable - the most you will require is a dummy system, probably a replica of windows, which seems to have the largest amount of non-portable software. Linux programs are portable for the most part - Windows' biggest problem is the registry. If you install the program into a fake Windows install (such as Wine), they should theoretically work fine - as long as they can write to a fake registry etc etc. It's a bit more complicated than that - particularly if a piece of software is drawing on different resources specific to an OS, and the concept of a 'replica OS' is still far from fruition (Wine isn't perfect, and virtualisation isn't a solution). If you can satisfy the needs of a piece of software on a portable device, then that software is then portable.

Best advice? Only use software which you know to be portable. You've asked a lot of questions about portable software etc - it's very difficult to answer them because there's no real answer. The easiest method by far is to just use cross-platform, open source software - because the chances are that that software is self-sufficient, and doesn't rely on things like a registry.

[billdotson]

yeah most Linux software is like that.. which is awesome.. but why do people even program these apps to use the registry?? I installed Audacity (also on Linux) and it tried to write to the registry! GRrrrr.