I will say, as someone who has been looking for a simple way to install Linux on my Windows desktop at home, this is incredibly useful. Doubly so as I'm not very experienced with installing OS's and Linux can look very intimidating to an outsider looking in!
Ugh I switched to Arch full time 5 years ago and I had to walk to the servers uphill both ways in the snow. Kids today don't know how good they have it.
It must have gotten better than the last time I tried to use Ventoy. Maybe 5 years ago? It kept complaining that the USB drive I was using was bad when it worked completely fine with other tools.
Ventoy is great. It was a bit confusing when I first ran into it. It installed, but I didn't know what happened. Lmao. I think I installed it like 10 times because it wasn't telling me what it did, but then the light bulb went off. Aaaaaah.
I was trying to install windows on a laptop and it was being a bitch on the USB stick, and Ventoy made it work.
Yeah totally go with Ventoy. I had an external device that basically did the same thing but it was a pain in the ass. Little screen and you pick an iso on the drive and it simulated a CD rom. Ventoy is so much simpler. My only complaint is there isn’t an installer that works on a Mac so I have to use Windows. But other than that it’s awesome.
Isn't it cool that you only need to use the terminal when you really need it? Simple tasks as flashing an usb stick shouldnt require knowledge of the terminal.
And that's why It's great to have choice. Also, if you start off in CLI, it can be quite overwhelming. The first time I had to partition my drive I was super scared not to mess it up. A few months later I knew exactly what I was doing.... when I was using a graphical installer or Gparted. Earlier today, I partitioned my drive using cfdisk (fdisk feels kinda painful; press this, then this, and if, like me, you don't know the commands by heart, it can take too long), and I installed Arch manually cuz I was bored. It was my first time doing a manual install with systemd-boot (always did grub in the past), so I didn't realise I had to write my own boot entries for all 3 kernels (mainline, zen and lts), and because of font issues, I just switched back to Fedora (going up a version from 39 to 40 in the process) where I had an issue with a qt component that meant my sddm theme was not working. It isn't the theme's fault, that's for sure, as it worked perfectly on Fedora 39 and elsewhere, and because pretty much all themes I could find relied on this qt module (it's qtgraphicaleffects, packaged as qt5-qtgraphicaleffects on Fedora) , I got a bit angry and then sat down and rewrote the theme, removing any dependency on graphicaleffects (was only used for drop shadows in some popups), though for some reason some of the colours also got a bit funky but it works and it works well (I also had to hide one of the popups but it wasn't an essential one).
But I digress. Point is, if it's more comfortable for you, you'll use it. If it isn't but you want it to be, then to ill force yourself to use and get better. If you don't, you just won't. That's the power of choice in Linux.
For example, when you want to install desktop environments, you need to use CLI. There’s no GUI option. I guess that’s why Linux is considered “difficult” for Windows/MacOS users, while they can use Chromebook, which is also Linux.
The point of original post is how zdnet is trying to let people use Linux, right?
I see people say this a lot and I have no experience with this but I wonder why you wouldn't use a USB nvme SSD enclosure it seems a lot easier and idk if running it over USB would limit the speed but it could preform better than a USB stick.
A dumb little stick is fine for the occasional "fix something up" or "take a snapshot of a Windows drive because dd is objectively better than anything that Windows itself could do". A live iso distro precludes me from adding a handful of other useful tools.
I kept seeing so many different ones recommended and I kept getting weird issues I didn't understand with most of them. I don't often need to make a bootable Linux USB, but every time, Rufus did the job quick and easy.
Unetbootin in 2024? Jeez, just use Belena Etcher for single ISO, or dd if you are already on Linux (it should work on Mac as well) or Ventoy for simply folder of your bootable isos
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