So over the years (decade?) I’ve used Ventoy a lot. For those not aware, it is basically a live USB that you can add other ISOs to to boot into those. Usually overkill but incredibly useful for those days when you need diagnostics, a simple terminal, and then to install something what you actually want.

But… it feels like I run into corner cases and issues with ventoy more often than not. Proxmox or Fedora or whatever decide to do something even slightly different and then I need to upgrade ventoy and blah blah blah. Also… I am not the most comfortable with downloading anything from Sourceforge these days. Let alone something that is going to have a LOT of power over whatever machines I provision.

So I suspect the real answer is to either set up a way to network boot (although, not all machines support that) or buy like five cheap USB drives and put them on a keychain and not over-complicate things.

But if I DID want to over-complicate them… is there anything better than Ventoy these days?

Thanks

  • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    It’s a common problem of all universal iso bootloaders. They make some kind of magic to boot images the way they are not supposed to. It breaks very often.

    If you need a live system for diagnostics, simply install your favorite distro and tools that you use to a USB stick. And buy a second one for an installation image.