Tutorial – Ventoy

The Linux community teems with "distro hoppers," users who are always trying out new distributions. There is nothing at all wrong with that; we are always happy to discover new treasures in the Linux universe. Nevertheless, distro hopping can be hard work. Just downloading and transferring the ISO images to a USB memory stick takes time and involves risks. A simple typo in a command might cause you to move the image to the wrong place by mistake and accidentally delete important data.

Wouldn't it be far simpler if you could simply copy an ISO image off the web to a USB stick with a file manager and boot directly from the drive? Ideally, such a Linux USB memory stick would not only carry a distribution but even offer a selection of systems. For example, you could quickly demonstrate the differences between Ubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro to a friend without having to prepare and carry around several USB drives. The Ventoy boot manager offers precisely this solution [1].

Installing Ventoy

Ventoy is available for both Linux and Windows. On Linux, however, the program is currently only available in Arch Linux and its Manjaro derivative. Ventoy is found in the Arch User Repository (AUR). To install, you will therefore need to use an AUR helper like Yay, where you load the program into your system by typing yay -S ventoy.

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