Linux

Balena Etcher is a writer that does one ISO at a time. Other similar options are Fedora Writer, Rufus, etc.

Ventoy is one that can do multiple ISOs and is generally easy to manage.

However, be aware that Ventoy has a lot of unknown code involved. There's binary blobs that the maintainer refuses to open source, so there's a big question over whether it's hiding some malware or is using unpatched packages. Nobody knows except the maintainer, and it's just his word saying it's safe. You could use it to test out ISOs, but I wouldn't personally use it to actually install a system.

Also, the Ventoy fanbois are pretty insufferable, and they tend to brigade anyone that speaks ill of Ventoy or its dev.

If you want something similar that's open source, Glim works and could be a good option; YUMI has been around for a while, but I dunno if it's still a good project or not.

Edit: typo

Ah, yes, Ventoy, my favorite “open source” program. https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795

Love ventoy. That one usb becomes a Swiss army chainsaw.

But as said elsewhere it hides proprietary blobs among other things.

I liked etcher before balena bought it. The cli was small and easy to use. After the buyout it got super bloated.

USBImager does the same thing.

Those are two completely different programs. balencaEtcher is for flashing an ISO to the USB stick. Basically its like installing an operating system on your hard drive, but it installs it on the USB drive. It will make it bootable. If you want a different OS, you have to completely flash the drive and replace whats there.

Ventoy will also make the USB stick bootable, but it will not flash an operating system onto it. It's more like a general launcher of ISO files. This means, you only install Ventoy once and then can drag and drop ISO files to a folder. If you boot Ventoy from USB stick, it will show a list of all available ISO files. Choose one and it boots into the distribution, like you would have flashed it with balencaEtcher.

The advantage of Ventoy is clear: Easy replaceable ISO files and having many to choose from withing a single installation. Filenames of ISOs doesn't matter and they can be placed in sub directories in the ISO folder I think. Ventoy will just list all available ISOs you can choose and boot into. The disadvantage is, that some distributions or hardware might not work well with Ventoy, but that's not my experience so far.

You're comparing apples to oranges here, but of course Ventoy is a more versatile tool, after one time preparation you're just copying ISOs like files, you can use multiple ISOs at once etc, also do you really need a clunky electron app to burn images on Linux

ventoy is nice in that I can just dump ISOs to a single USB and take it around, but balena is one of many boot media tools that's useful if you need a single ISO for a system - fast.

I use Ventoy regularly but im too lazy to setup Grub2 on a USB and load up isos.

Not sure who these Ventoy fanbois or bros are.

Yup Ventoy does hide binary blobs and has some dodgy devs and code. Use at own risk.

Also I dont have any sensitive stuff. So mostly Ventoy is used to install playground server isos and stuff. Not much use for it otherwise.

You can also write an iso to a USB stick with:

cp path/to/awesome.iso /dev/disk/by-id/usb-My_flash_drive

Endeavour IS is arch with KDE and a few basic apps. Pretty sure you dont need WiFi to test it. For any issues you can just use the arch wiki. I really enjoyed it as first distro as the wiki is so helpful. I moved to Mint tho (not DE) and have loved not having to use the terminal for anything.

Belena is simpler, it’s just writing an image to a drive.

Ventoy is complicated and changes the booted image to make it work. That sometimes breaks things.