Just for fun, I thought I'd try running all my radio rx'ing software on a thumbdrive bootable in Linux. I used a Puppy/Debian distro and "burned" the iso to a 16gb usb thumbdrive formatted as NTFS. Results better than expected. So it has all the needed internet software, the system runs fine and has all but one radio program that currently isn't working (Argo). GQRX runs the sdr's. WSJTX suite for decoding, QSSTV for sstv, FLDIGI for the non-wsjtx decoding. I think the Argo problem is possibly a WINE issue. Argo loads but can't find the audio paths needed.
It's cool having a complete system on a thumbdrive that can be kept for times of unplanned pc "problems" that inevitably occur once in a while. The drive still has room for "expansion" of other radio software that might be desired in the future.
Ray