Rufus alternative Ventoy, a Windows 11, Linux USB install app, reaches major milestone

Ventoy is a powerful bootable USB media creation utility like Rufus and it has just hit its sixth anniversary with newest release.

If you have ever installed Windows, especially without official means, you are probably familiar with Rufus or at least must have heard of it. Simiar to Rufus, Ventoy is also an open-source utility designed to simplify the creation of bootable media. With it users can copy ISO, WIM, IMG, or other supported image files onto the device and boot them via the utility's built-in menu.

The tool supports a wide range of platforms, both BIOS and UEFI systems, and works with many operating systems, from Windows to major Linux distributions. It also allows multiple images on a single drive, making it useful for testing, recovery, or installation purposes. The app just received its latest update today and it is a significant one since it marks its sixth anniversary update. The author of the utility had launched the first version back in April of 2020.

Despite being a milestone release, the new update primarily focuses on stability rather than any major feature additions. According to the official release notes, the new software resolves installtion issues with immutable Linux distros and improves handling of boot processes in UEFI environments. The update patches problems affecting certain distributions where the boot menu either failed to load or resulted in kernel errors during initialization. It also includes some code optimizations and bug fixes that improve overall reliability when dealing with some ISO files. The previous release already fixed a Windows boot issue in F2 "browse" mode so that is also included with this update.

For anyone wondering, immutable Linux distros are systems where the core operating system files are read-only, preventing unintended or malicious changes. Hence, updates are delivered atomically without being fragmented. Examples include Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE MicroOS which use this model to improve stability and security. In such cases, apps are typically installed via containers or package layers.

The full changelog of the 6th Anniversary Version 1.1.11 update is given below:

• Fix the display issue when UEFI booting Windows/WinPE ISO.
• Add VT_WINDOWS_DISK_NONVTOY_CLOSEST_XXX, VT_LINUX_DISK_NONVTOY_CLOSEST_XXX options in AutoInstall plugin.
• Improvement for Ventoy2Disk.sh
• Improvement for porteus-hook.sh
• Improvement for booting T2SDE.
• Add support for KylinSecOS

You can download it from this page on the official Ventoy GitHub repo.

Source

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Posted Monday 6 April 2026 at 12:55 pm AEST (my time).

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