 don't distro hop nearly as much as I used to I used to distro hop a lot let's just put it that way there was a point in time when I was still you know really new to Linux where I would move between distros basically every other day it was kind of ridiculous if something was even the slightest bit wrong with a distribution or I had any interest in another distribution I would immediately burn to a USB key that ISO and hop away it was a it was an experience because I learned a lot of stuff about Linux during that time now I don't do that so much I found my distro fedora is my distro and I'm happy with it but I still as a Linux YouTuber test out a lot of different Linux distributions so I always have a ton of ISOs lying around and usually that entails me taking an ISO putting on a USB key doing the distro review or whatever I'm going to be doing with it and then you know basically rinse and repeat so I'm always having to use something like DD to actually burn an ISO onto a USB key and do the things that I need to do so when I found a tool called Ventoy that offers to change the whole game I was very interested now I've heard of Ventoy many times in the past and I've tried it one time back when it was really new and it didn't succeed for me it was not a successful endeavor at that time I don't know if it was because of me being an idiot or because it was so new I can't really say but it kind of put me off from trying it again despite the promise of this tool so what does Ventoy actually do and why should you try it well the whole premise is that it allows you to have one USB key which mine looks like this if you can see this little thing and you have this one thing and it you install Ventoy on it and then you can just transfer ISOs onto it and when I say ISOs I mean ISOs as in plural like you can put as many ISOs on that drive as it can fit on it so right now this one has about 10 ISOs on it which is an extraordinary thing right usually when you burn a USB stick it has one ISO on it and it's a one-time use kind of thing you can install just that one ISO and that's all it's done with it until you can go and either format it and use it for another ISO or whatever so Ventoy will allow you to create a stick that has as many ISOs as possible to fit on your USB key and then install just like you would normally so you might be able to see the promise behind this because if you distro hop a lot or even if you don't distro hop but you do try out a lot of distros you can put all of your distros that you could possibly want on a Ventoy stick and just have them all in your pocket for as long as you want and you can from the grub like menu that will I'll show you here right now you can just choose between the distros that are on the stick and install them or even just use the live environment it's really really cool and the thing about it is is that it's not even that hard to install so for Linux you download a tar ball and it has these files inside of it and the one that you'll want will depend on what architecture you're wanting to use me personally I use the Ventoy GUI dot x8664 so I would do dot slash like this and it's gonna ask you for a super user password so you'll need it if you're using a window manager you'll have to have Paul kids insult or if you're using a desktop environment just under your password because it should work no problem and this is what Ventoy will look like you will want to choose the proper drive that you want to make into a ventoy stick make sure you're choosing the right one because I've because this is going to format the desk it's going to just tell you the version of Ventoy that you're going to be installing on if you already have Ventoy on the USB stick it will have something in this box and then you can use this tool to update it to a different version of Ventoy if you want to so you just install it's going to ask you if you're wanting to continue it'll ask you the same question again you hit okay and it'll take a minute or so not even a minute and it's done that's all you have to do now you can close Ventoy and I'm going to open up Crusader here and if you then go to the removable devices and see a removable device called Ventoy you click on that and then you go to your ISOs you can then transfer all of those ISOs over to the stick that you created now this particular stick will won't hold all of these but I could transfer let's say the fedora and the silver blue one over there and just do that and then copy here and it will do its thing it won't even take very long that's it and then when you put this into the computer you want to install on just boot into that USB key just like you would normally with any ISO stick and then it will bring up a Ventoy grub like selector choose the ISO that you want to install or the distro that you want to install and you'll be done that's all there is to it it's so astonishingly simple and works so astonishingly well it's just it's a game changer if you try a lot of distros because you can carry with you as many distros as you want obviously the bigger the USB stick you have the more I shows you can carry so I recommend if you're going to do this have a big one this one here is 128 gigabytes it was like $16 on Amazon which is I mean if you're past the age of like 30 years old you'll remember when a 2 gigabyte stick was like 50 bucks the fact that you can get 128 gigabytes or more for under $20 is just it blew my mind it's even brand name it's really what that's beside the point but the point is then toy is amazing it's a game changer if you choose or if you try a lot of distros it's just it's absolutely amazing I highly recommend you give it a try now there are other features that I haven't got into yet there's a web UI supposedly that does some pretty cool things I don't know what those pretty cool things are I just haven't looked into it yet so that's something that I want to do you can also supposedly set some environment variables on the stick itself so that you can kind of organize the ISO so if you want to create distro directories so you could have a whole bunch of Ubuntu ISOs all in the Ubuntu directory you could do that you can set it up so that it only sees ISOs from one directory if you want to there are many different things you can do with it that I just really haven't played with yet just the base functionality is really cool and that's why I wanted to make this video so if you have thoughts on Ventoy you can leave those thoughts in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you you can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey those links will be in the video description you can support me on patreon at patreon.com the linux cast links for liberapay and youtube support will be down in the video description below thanks everybody who does support me on patreon youtube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you the channel just not be anywhere near where it is right now so thank you so very very much for your support I truly do appreciate it you guys are all amazing thank you for your support again I really appreciate it thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time