I'm a big fan of the live to usb apps like usbcreator and unetbootin but they are very limited for real work. A great way to get going fast.

The way they work is they combine the live image set of file with a casper file. That casper file can't fully make proper changes to the image. Things that require kernel and other system files can't be updated or edited.


Last note, you can go to sites like SuseStudio and create an image that is made to apply to a usb and will work like a normal install.

I haven't used the live creators in a long while. Larger faster usb drives are just too cheap now.

I believe low speed isn't a "minimalistic" vs "bloated" issue.
I had Gentoo (no doubt, it is one of the fastest distros) installed onto 4 class SD. It was really slow system, for example, firefox took about 10 secs to start, dolphin needed 4 secs to show up a window.
I bought 10 class SD card hoping it will be noticable faster and cloned a system onto this card. Though 10 class is two times faster than 4 class, I didn't get the same speed improvement for the system. Firefox - 8 secs, dolphin - 3 secs.
Not being satisfied with such a performance, I packed some parts of filesystem into aufs (it is much more faster to mount compact filesystem as loop device and then decompress it than to read it non-compressed directly from card), and, in addition, unpacked some mostly critical directories (/lib, /usr/bin, /usr/lib) into RAM (tmpfs). This way I got really fast system, faster than regular HDD system. Dolphin starts in the blink of an eye, firefox takes less then 1 sec to start.