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Try Luma from a USB stick without touching your disk

Boot the live system, use it for an afternoon, and shut down. Nothing on your drive changes.

The live stick is the whole system running from USB. Your existing disk is not mounted for writing, so there is nothing to undo afterward.

What you need

  1. A USB stick of 8 GB or more. Everything on it will be erased.
  2. The Luma image from the download page.
  3. A computer that can boot from USB; most made after 2015 can.

Write the stick

  1. Open the Luma Writer on Windows, macOS, or Linux and pick the image.
  2. Pick the stick. Check the size twice.
  3. Write, then eject when it finishes.

Boot it

  1. Restart with the stick in. Hold the boot-menu key your machine uses, usually F12, F2, or Escape.
  2. Choose the stick.
  3. Pick Try Luma. The desktop appears in under a minute.
Your files are visible read-only from the live system so you can open them, but nothing is written back.

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