This is one of the hardest Linux utilities, one of the most important, and one of the easiest to forget. With Linux it seems like even when you find a distribution you like (Debian in my case), it generally doesn’t stop a lot of people from wanting to try other distributions. And for those of us who go distro-hopping, it generally means re-flashing the same USB over and over again with different images using dd, or it means burning a lot of DVD’s. The DVD’s are actually kind of nice to have around, and I’d actually be interested in creating some cover art, and buying some disk labels to decorate my shelf with. The problem with DVD’s is generally they become obsolete pretty quickly.

But there is one magical tool that takes the trouble out of all of this. And that is Ventoy. Ventoy is a simple yet amazing tool. You write it to a USB, and then all you have to do from there is drag and drop ISO files onto the disk. When you boot from the USB, you will then be greeted with a select list of which image you want to boot to. Which means you can slap it on a 32 or 64GB USB and just having a rolling list of all of the images you want to boot to. Pretty useful. The reason I didn’t make a note of it before was because I wrote it to a USB once before thinking that was the end of my issues. Then when I installed Linux, I accidentally wrote over the Ventoy USB trying to install a separate home partition and there went all of my ISO’s.

It’s a useful tool, and I keep forgetting the name. So here it is in blog-form so I can find locate and install the utility again. Next time I use it, I’ll try not to do anything stupid.