Yesterday I’ve found and then later installed Ventoy (see its Wikipedia page), an open source multiboot tool to create bootable media with – looks like the picture on its Wikipedia page:
In my case, I’ve put four different operating systems on my cheap 32GB stick, see them here on my file browser on Linux:
That’s the current Arch Linux and Windows 10 from this half year (21H1), plus live iso images of both the currently stable Debian 10.9 “Buster”, and the 20.04 LTS version of UbuntuStudio. Plus I have an own folder on it which I cleaned up a bit as well, so now the stick is less than half full.
This is cool – I’ve tried it on my own machine after work, and booted into UbuntuStudio to verify that it works. And if you want to change any of these operating systems to newer versions, simply swap out their iso files, and that’s it, which makes upgrading and staying current really easy.
Look at the Ventoy webpage in case you’re interested. And it will format your stick with the exFAT file system so that even images with more than 4GB (like the Windows you see above which has some 5.3 or so Gigabytes) can be stored – FAT32 can’t do that.
RRS (Really recommended stuff), and thanks to “longpanda” and the Ventoy team 🙂
Update, from June 2nd: just added Fedora Workstation 34 to the images on my USB key. This is a live image like Debian and Ubuntu so it’s bootable without changing anything on your machine. And while it’s not as current as the rolling release Arch distribution, it still comes with Gnome 40. It also invents Pipewire as the default audio system which is supposed to replace both Alsa *and* Jack one day, so playing around with that (as a musician) could also be interesting. Fedora is the development testbed and free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and like it comes with free software only (by default). So it’s well worth having a look at in case you don’t mind using RPM and dnf (or yum) instead of apt (Debian/Ubuntu) or pacman (Arch).
