What is the best Image USB Bootstick Tool for Linux?

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As you see in the Topic Title, im looking for the best image usb bootstick utility.

I always used Rufus for Windows and i loved it alot, but sadly this tool isn’t available for Linux.

With Rufus i could created a Bootstick that was compatible for MBR and UEFI boot at the same time and also the usage of Fat32 is a big Plus… to load my Bios Settings and is accessible from Bios.

I heared on a youtube video that Etcher had some shady network telemetrie… but the UI also looks very limited.

When i look at a tutorial from Ventoy it looks i have to decide between MBR or UEFI and the Partition will be ExFat instead Fat32… im not sure if i want to go this way.

Are there other good Tools, that comes close to Rufus?

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ventoy, if it is a flash drive exFAT should not be a problem. almost every moder OS reads it. the MBR/EFI choice should’nt be issue if you are using this on any box made after 2011

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Ventoy

If true - why would you care?

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Rufus and etcher are both garbage.

I like ventoy.

But if you want something simpler there is imagewriter from suse.
mintstick is similar and ok.
Even simpler of course is just using dd.

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I’ve been using popsicle (available from the Extra repo) lately without any issues. It overwrites any previous images, so you can’t append images like you can with Ventoy. However, it does enable writing to multiple flash drives at the same time - great for if you want to copy the Manjaro ISO to several USB sticks.

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ruuuuust. that ones new to me. :slight_smile:

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At the moment i use MBR, but when my GPU breaks anytime in future, im forced to switch to UEFI because newer GPU’s won’t give me a Postscreen anymore with MBR… so it would help if my Bootstick support both ways at the same time.

I don’t think its possible to save/load bios settings from this drive then…

any box after 2011? I have no clue what that means.

I have no clue why you put Rufus in the same drawer as Etcher.

Well i dont mind simple, but my goal is to combine fat32 with MBR/UEFI support.
When this required few adjustments, i would be intrested to learn.

This feature from Ventoy to use several images on a single Bootstick looks promising but i don’t care when there is fat32 support and allows MBR/UEFI Boot at the same time.

Thank you all for this good collection of tools.

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Fedora Image Writer is good.

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MBR is a partitioning scheme, and the UEFI specification supports it, albeit that some buggy UEFI implementations only support it if CSM is enabled.

My system has CSM disabled, and yet I can boot up — in native UEFI mode — from a ventoy stick.

ventoy is the way to go. Besides, the filesystem on the stick should not matter to you, because it’s loopback-mounting the ISOs directly, so you’re never really interacting with the filesystem unless you’re copying an ISO to it or removing an ISO.

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You can make a stick doing both mbr and efi

You can combine some of the topics fromt the forum to achieve the goal.

The mbusb script would be a great place to start

… combining with

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I decided now to use Ventoy, and marked in the option to left room open for a additional fat32 Partition to save/load/restore my bios settings.

Thanks to all.

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