Linux

One of these should do what you're looking for. Each has a slightly different approach.

https://etcher.balena.io/

https://unetbootin.github.io/

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

What?

Rufus just flashes ISOs to disks. On Linux you can doo that with

• udisksctl or dd
• Impression
• Fedora Media Writer
• KDE Iso Image writer
• Balena Etcher

But you are talking about something completely different and Ventoy does that.

Ventoy ftw

Personally I have a USB drive with Ventou and have been using that for a long time.

But before that I just did a dd. Although I seem to remember someone doing a benchmark and realizing that piping the file was faster. Here's what I mean by that:

In bash you have the echo command which prints text:

echo "Hello"

Will print Hello.

In bash you can send the output of a command to a file, so:

echo "Hello" > hello.txt

Will write Hello in the hello.txt file.

In bash you can use the cat command to read files:

cat hello.txt

Will print the Hello we wrote in that file earlier.

In Linux drives are files, so if your USB drive is in /dev/sdb (DON'T JUST BLINDLY COPY THIS) you can create an image of it like so:

cat /dev/sdb > usb.iso

But also the devices are writable, so you can flash an image to a disk by doing it the other way around:

cat image.iso > /dev/sdb 

dd if=image.img of=/dev/disk/flashdrive is usually all you need

If you want a GUI, I would use Balena Etcher. You might be able to use raspberri pi imager too.

Ventoy is great as others have said, and probably would do what you want since it has its own installer and is its own bootloader, and can boot isos loaded on the USB drive.

If you want something that works, in my experience, as well as Rufus, maybe take a look at Balena Etcher, too.

They obviously don't have the features that Rufus has, but I've ended up using the default USB image writers that come pre-installed (found them on both Mint and Manjaro, probably available on others). If you're just looking to write an ISO, check to see if you already have one.

ventoy is what has worked best for me

Well, on MX I'm using "MX Live USB Maker" which can flash any ISO on thumb drive, it's a built-in tool.

Now I'm using Ventoy, you just put multiple ISO on the thumb drive and choose it when you boot the USB drive, it's wonderful, no more "1 OS per drive", you just take a 32GB USB drive and you can put 10 distro on it.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/screenshot.html

Balena Etcher is what you want, though AFAIK if you're making a Windows installer no Linux programs have the convenient options to disable TPM and online account etc that make Rufus so nice.

The principal alternative to Rufus is Balena etchter, but for me it works 1/5 times. But now I'm using Ventoy and... Just use it, it damn fucking good!

Thanks everyone. I tried ventoy but it didn't work straight away. I do like the idea of having a list of isos to pick from, but it might take more tweaking to get right.

I went with the boot loading tool in Fedora since I just wanted to flash mint to do a reinstall on my kids' laptop

My honest recommendation is dd It works, it does it's job, and doesn't need to many bells and whistles. My only complaint is that there isn't an easy way to show progress. But as a background command, it works.

darn I thought this was about my dream thing which would be a flashed boot loader on a drive where you had a folder you could add iso's and it would automatically give you a list of isos to boot from.

I haven't found a good GUI (Balena's Etcher is cross platform, but the flatpak never worked for me)

dd has never failed me

sudo dd if=<path to ISO file> of=<path to USB> bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

(double, triple and quadruple check that the output file, of=, is the correct device with multiple different commands before running this)

https://github.com/pop-os/popsicle