MOUSELING.net - Portable applications are more useful than you think

Portable applications are more useful than you think

If you move around computers a lot, whether it be for school or work or personal reasons, you probably have a USB with some spare storage to keep various important files on. This assumes, of course, that every computer you interact with has the programs you need to use. Often they will; sometimes they won't.

When it comes to persistent projects using the same application on various different PCs, some people will find Puppy Linux—a type of Linux distribution contained entirely on a USB, designed with portability in mind—the way to go. But what if you are used to working in a Windows environment, or the computers you work with don't allow you to mess with their boot order?

This is how I discovered the value in portable installations.

The computers at college don't have any proper IDE software, and they certainly don't allow you to install new programs on them. So what's to do for a mouse who has a lot of .php files lying around? Well, I discovered that I can run Visual Studio Code in portable mode.

There's easy official documentation for it. Using the .zip version of Visual Studio Code, you can create a "data" folder to keep all your extensions and user data in place, right on a USB, without ever touching your hard drive.

This is great for me: I need a code editor to continue updating sites like this one, and it's handy to have GitHub to make sure all my stuff is synced between devices (including my server). But after installing the relevant extension, I realised I need to install Git for GitHub, and public computers don't exactly have that either.

Is there a portable version of Git out there for me? Of course there is. It took some fiddling, but I got it working with in a drive-letter-agnostic manner. Score!

Then it occurred to me that I have some websites I push via FTP, not Github. Is there a portable version out there? There is, thanks to PortableApps.com who seem to be a beautiful project pushing out portable versions of any open source software they can get their hands on. What does this mean? It means your files never have to touch the hard drive of your host device.

I thought, surely I can get a portable browser too? I hate logging in to my school accounts every time I use a new computer, let alone Chess.com or my email. A completely safe way to avoid using the place's jacked-up Chrome is to just use my own version of Firefox, of course. I could even route my traffic through Proton VPN.

Would you believe it? Even without access to any important parts of a computer, I can still stay private, keep my user settings to myself, and use my preferred software. If you can't use Puppy Linux, I think this is a great solution for a computer-hopper... granted you don't run into any Macs. ;-)