So over the years (decade?) I’ve used Ventoy a lot. For those not aware, it is basically a live USB that you can add other ISOs to to boot into those. Usually overkill but incredibly useful for those days when you need diagnostics, a simple terminal, and then to install something what you actually want.
But… it feels like I run into corner cases and issues with ventoy more often than not. Proxmox or Fedora or whatever decide to do something even slightly different and then I need to upgrade ventoy and blah blah blah. Also… I am not the most comfortable with downloading anything from Sourceforge these days. Let alone something that is going to have a LOT of power over whatever machines I provision.
So I suspect the real answer is to either set up a way to network boot (although, not all machines support that) or buy like five cheap USB drives and put them on a keychain and not over-complicate things.
But if I DID want to over-complicate them… is there anything better than Ventoy these days?
Thanks
Take a look at the IODD ST400.
It’s a hardware solution to your problem: you put multiple isos on an ssd, plug your ssd into the ST400, then plug the ST400 into the computer you want to live boot from (through USB).
From the ST400 you can quickly swap the active ISO, and it acts like a virtual DVD drive to the target computer, and you’re basically ejecting and inserting a new DVD every time you do so.
You can also mount it for RW operations (ie. for inserting new ISOs without having to remove the SSD), for which it acts like a regular usb disk - but I recommend using it usually in RO mode to avoid data corruption.
It’s not that user friendly, but once you get used to it, it’s a perfect multiboot tool to have in your belt.