Maybe I'm confused but I think the persistent home is only for storing data outside the ISO, not at all for booting the ISO.

You're still supposed to boot from the CD or DvD and the persistent home just allows you to save changes and stuff you've added as if you had done a full hard drive install, in other words, so you can save files and settings and install probgrams and not have it all go away every time you reboot.

It's something that lots of live distros do in order to let you take your desktop with you... like OS on a disc and data on a usb drive.

And from little I know Knoppix seems to be the king mega-inclusive portable distro but if you're not concerned with portability and want to do an HD install so the OS and bundled apps respond faster, you're probably better off doing a normal debian install.