Ventoy: Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI Files

In perfect world, Microsoft would help to create this tool.

Nope, they don't have time for this. Too much work om security through obscurity, making crap SW which eats RAM like hamburgers and disabling local accounts...

Also, adding Copilot to everything.

Microsoft provides a tool called "Media Creation Tool" https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/software-download/windows11

But of course it’s highly simplified and designed solely for installing Windows.

For Windows and FROM Windows.

I swear the most recommended way of creating a bootable Windows USB on Linux changes every year, and usually doesn't work. I keep an old Windows laptop just so I can create bootable Windows usbs, whenever needed.

Stretching your hate for the company a bit too far, don't you think? I mean all the cool kids do it, but you can't blame them for not having done this.

For as long as Windows has supported UEFI, you've just been able to copy the files from the ISO directly to a UEFI partition.

Making custom Windows install media is insanely painful, even from Windows. I went through the process of creating non-interactive install media for Windows once, and was astonished at how awful it is compared to building custom Linux live media. (Not least of all because of the churn in the XML you have to maintain that basically represents clicking through all the installer menus.)

ramburgers are quite healthy, they've been shown to improve memory

I think that’s a really unfair portrayal of Microsoft’s product management. They spend a lot of time— even more than on some of the things you listed — creating GUI frameworks to ignore, injecting creepy analytics for their war on privacy, obfuscating those analytics and stymieing users efforts to avoid them, and figuring out terrifying new definitions for the word experience.

WAIK? I created a customized Windows install image as a 19 year old intern and presented it to the rest of the IT team...

It depends on what customizations you'd like to use.

I've also had a very hard time creating an automated install media for an appliance for windows iot... Worst was the (LLM generated?) powershell scripts in the documentation that didn't work at all.

Microsoft's tooling for customizing images amounts to several gigabytes to download and install just to get started.

The Windows approach is based on a mix of relatively limited offline modifications and automating clicks and keystrokes (AutoUnattend.xml, OOBE.xml) and recording or forgetting manual changes (Audit Mode, Sysprep). Both are insanely kludgey.

New development of the tooling always comes to dism.exe first rather than the DISM PowerShell module, so you may need to use DOS commands instead of the (very lovely) modern shell that Microsoft maintains.

Depending on what kind of stuff you're trying to install, you might need to do half a dozen reboots in the course of recording your manual changes.

Mounting/unmounting a WIM file can take more than a minute (wtf?) and if you're working on modifying one of the installer images from upstream, you need dozens of gigabytes of free disk space.

If you don't just want install media, but a bootable repair environment, everything is even worse. Hardware recognition is bad, boot is slow, and only some programs can actually run in a WinPE environment.

Have you ever customized bootable Linux media?

When I had to make some custom NixOS install media for an aarch64 VPS, it required only a few lines of code in the exact same environment as I use to customize running systems, and it's completely declarative, non-interactive, requires no special toolkit, doesn't require dozens of gigabytes of scratch space, never requires me to boot anything...

Teenage interns can also shovel manure, but that doesn't make it pleasant or painless!

>eats RAM like hamburgers and disabling local accounts...

Those are the kind of hamburgers that make people say "Where's the beef?"