Also, Rufus is currently only available as a Windows executable afaik, whereas balenaEtcher has downloads for multiple platforms.
Ventoy doesn’t even need to be installed, just unzipped to your local drive. It provides a GUI or can be simply run from cmd line to create a bootable USB drive, then you just copy ISO files to it, as many as will fit. I have 20 ISOs on a 256GB stick.
You can also test drive Linux distros at Distrosea although you don’t get a choice of hardware to run on, but it’s good for checking out interfaces and default apps etc.
. I have loaded W11 Ubuntu and Mint ISOs onto the stick in Windows file manager. but when I tried to boot from the USB, I got an error. I wonder what I am doing wrong
@Boyd_Goldie I have some time tomorrow afternoon for Ventoy if you want… However, I’m in Belgium. I don’t know if that fits your time zone or if it would be evening for you, so I’ll check if it’s within my available hours.
It would be helpful if you gave additional information. I have been using Ventoy for several years now, installing it to USB drives using the command line from within Linux.
Maybe the error you got comes from the ISO itself, or maybe from the computer you are trying to start. This is why details matter.
Maybe here is not the right forum to talk about it and would need a thread of its own?
There are many ways to create bootable USB drives, and several types of possible drives too. Each fixer probably has their favorite ones.
My favorite ones are using Ventoy and having full ISO images in the dedicated partition created when installing Ventoy.
My former favorite method is the old way, which consists in installing the Grub boot manager on a USB stick (GRUB is the most used Free bootloader among Linux users) and creating manually the Grub configuration file with prerecorded distributions (blocks of text that indicate which ISO and the necessary tech information to boot the ISO images).
There are also tools to make bootable ISOS for several USB sticks at the same time.
There also exists a project named Plop which helps booting to USB on old machines which can’t (or even on some machines which can, but bypassing the BIOS and “search for the right key on the keyboard” stanza). https://plop.at.
The one I used is the freeware, I haven’t tried the Linux version (free to get, not free to modify).
Two kinds of USB sticks are needed : the ones which are compatible with more recent computers, and thus have a GPT type of partition, and the ones more compatible with older computers and have a ms-dos type of partition.
I would also like to talk about project I am working on with a few friends, which is a tool for all users to have when testing a computer and getting the information such as brand, model, BIOS date, CPU type and model, RAM, Ethernet and wifi cards, sound card, mainly. It will be very simple, the tool one needs to do a fast search without the need for extended knowledge. The support is a Live Linux distribution, rebuilt to be very light and optimized (thus using one of the known Linux distributions as a basis).
One more tool to prepare a bootable USB device, this one is meant for Linux users: Gnome Multi Writer. it is very easy to use, and is packaged, at least in Debian Ubuntu and other derivatives. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-multi-writer/ (I don’t know about the other distributions).
This one installs with the isolinux bootloader, so it can work where Ventoy won’t : in old computers which don’t have UEFI. I have installed it to 2 USB drives (2.0) with 2 GB space, and I have been able to boot an ISO on my old desktop, which does not recognize Ventoy.
