The savior, thy name is Ventoy. Apologies in advance to everyone who has known about this incredibly useful tool, this post isn't for you. This post is for everyone else who, like me, has been wasting their time flashing USB bootable installers onto flash drives to install Windows 11 or Linux onto various pieces of hardware.
There's absolutely no need for it, at least in a personal environment, and having discovered how game changing Ventoy is in this situation I quite literally want to shout it from the rooftops.
YOU SHOULD BE USING VENTOY!
OK, so just what is Ventoy?
Ventoy is a tool that you install to a USB flash drive that allows you to have a bootable install media for multiple different operating systems in one place. You don't have to have a drive for Windows 11, and a drive for Ubuntu, a drive for Proxmox, and so on. You can drop all of those ISO files onto one single drive and never have to worry about running it through something like Rufus or Balena Etcher.
It's open source, free to use, and after the initial setup, it's simply dragging and dropping files onto a USB drive just as you might do with photos or documents. It really is that easy.
The support is astonishing, too. Per the website, over 1,200 different image files have been verified as working with Ventoy, and this includes Windows.
How to use Ventoy to install different operating systems
There's a one time setup for Ventoy and all you need is to download the client from the website and grab a USB flash drive. Ventoy comes as a .zip package, and inside are various versions of the app, including for ARM64 if you have a Snapdragon-powered laptop.
Run the version for the machine you're on, not the ISO files you're going to be using, that's important. Plug your USB drive into your PC and click install. That's literally all there is to it. Keep the app around, though, because it's how you can update to newer versions.
All you need to do now is simply drag and drop the image files for the different operating systems you want to use onto the USB drive. No flashing, no other tools, just drag and drop.
Now, when you go to install one of these operating systems on a PC, you'll boot from USB as you would normally. But instead of going into, say, the Windows 11 installer, you'll see the Ventoy boot screen as shown further up this post.
Choose the one you want, hit enter, and you're into the installation process.
It's so simple, but so powerful, and I really can't believe I didn't know about this sooner. Instead of keeping up to half a dozen flash drives around for image files, all I need now is one. Ventoy is the one you need.
