Gone beyond just virtual machines, I have run the newly released Testing hybrid iso on a live usb (with persistence) and in an installed system. There are, of course, quite a few glitches and, as good as it already is, rooms for further improvements.
Also, the emerald theme is simply amazing. (For my own marketing purposes) I am seriously considering calling bookworm "
Emerald Linux".
The Testing live iso includes backport in the sources.list file. This seems to indicate the Debian developers have decided to beef up the backport developments (to allow bookworm to enjoy future developments without distro upgrading--sort of like Sid). This is a great news as many of my business friends don't like what comes after Debian 12.
Emerald Forever!
As I mentioned previously, we have been running bookworm--as a slice in time of sid--as our bread-generating work system for quite some time now, the transition from sid to testing, the latter as a freshly installed system, is actually quite smooth. For casual users, it is probably not a good idea to install Testing on your machine. Maybe wait for another year or so. In the meantime, if anyone is interested in making contributions to this potentially great OS, s/he should probably consider making a persistent liveusb.
For Debian systems, making a persistent liveusb is quite easy. With an already formatted usb, it is probably faster than using the dd command to burn an iso onto a usb stick. Also, unlike the dd command, a good chunk of the usb stick can still be used.
Ed.: The key element in making a Debian-style persistent liveusb is an initial partitioning of the usb stick. For starters all we need are two partitions, a fat32 partition (4GB or more, no need for labeling but I always label it as "EFI" for easy mounting) and an ext4 partition, labeled "persistence" (could be any size, typically we give it 16GB, but this is an overkill). Then copy the
content of the hybrid iso to the fat32 partition (I am using the rsync -r command to do the copying):
rsync -r --progress (mount point of the hybrid iso)/ /media/$USER/EFI/
If you are not interested in a persistent liveusb, this is enough to create a bootable usb. For persistence, only two small changes are needed.
1. The first change is to edit the grub.cfg file in the first (fat32) partition to add a
persistence boot parameter:
linux /live/vmlinuz-6.1.0-7-amd64 boot=live components persistence quiet splash findiso=${iso_path}
2. Then designate the partition for persistence (for starters, designate the entire system):
sudo chmod 777 /media/$USER/persistence
cd /media/$USER/persistence
echo / union > persistence.conf