I will add some love for #Ventoy. I had a fight with UEFI on $SPOUSE's new laptop, where it wouldn't boot from USB no matter what I tried. There were no EFI files set up to allow booting from anything other than Windows, Windows Recovery, or UEFI firmware upgrade.
But the laptop recognized an EFI file on the Ventoy thumbdrive, so I could boot the laptop, press F2 like a madman to enter the setup, reconfigure the boot setup to use the Ventoy's EFI, then reboot again, now from the thumbdrive into the Ventoy selector screen.
But then I had reason to boot into Windows again (so reboot, mad F2s, reconfigure, reboot) but stupidly left the Ventoy thumbdrive connected. When I was done with Windows I rebooted, mad F2s, but now the Ventoy EFI file was gone. I had to re-flash the thumbdrive with a fresh copy of Ventoy-UEFI to make it come back.
Now the laptop boots directly into Debian. I wonder the Debian EFI option will be wiped if $SPOUSE ever decides to boot into Windows again...
@geniusmusing #Ventoy is surprisingly good. I've used it a couple of times already. But recently, I was using it on the new Armbian installation on the #Orange_Pi_5 and ran into an issue:
* It sets up the flash drive using ExFAT as the file system. The instructions say you can change it later, but I never found that option. * The current set of OS installable programs (Armbian, but I presume Debian / Devuan / Ubuntu / Mint will be the same) does not include a version of mount that handles exfat. That was in the now-deprecated older package. * Turns out that Ventoy has a binary executable that I was able to copy into my path and use, so now S will receive a USB flash drive with 3 live distros (Debian, Ubuntu Desktop, CentOS Stream) and one direct installer (Ubuntu Server) on it.
I was tempted to add ReactOS, just so she'd see the difference between trying to clone a proprietary system without being sued is versus writing as desired. But I know she's just doing this so she'll have a passing familiarity and be able to check that box on some HR department's screening software's checklist. #ReactOS certainly will not help there.