This comes off as fairly ignorant. Virtual machines? Ventoy? There are lots of tools which can flash an ISO to a thumb drive or similar. ISO files are far more useful than just burning them to optical media.
The main reason you can easily copy installation images to USB sticks and other devices is that they are actually “hybrid” images with a bag of tricks helping them to also work like a disk drive, and boot that way. There are two boot loaders which handle different modes (and a third one in UEFI boot partition, though accessing it is firmware's problem), and the kernel knows that it can be started in various ways, and has to look for the root filesystem in multiple places. Ventoy and company make use of the fact that everything is ready, and the only thing left for them to do is adding the menu item with proper path and kernel boot options.
So you can run Linux from USB stick, you can run it from there, but use intermediate boot loader (say, Plop chain-loaded by main system to bypass slow USB access in old BIOS through its drivers, and massively decrease boot times), you can run it from extra partition added to your disk, you can run it from image file, you can run it from memory, and so on. ISO is just a convenient legacy distribution format that does not help with any of that. And, as mentioned, there is no “boot process” with UEFI, you simply copy a bunch of files to the USB flash drive, firmware sees that one of them looks like a boot loader, then it is started, and can do anything it wants.
Modern Linux ISOs are a sort of hacked hybrid ISO/IMG, where keeping support for burning to CDs (the ISO part) has some trade offs (such as workarounds needed for persistence storage, multiple partitions).
On the other hand, I can download an ISO for almost any popular Linux distro and easily install it without reading a single word of documentation, even if I've never used that distro before.
Just interactively setup a virtual machine and at the screen that provide you the choice of your disk size, you just select the option to use an existing disk and select it.
Sounds to me like you're one who is doing the VM right, as effectively as anybody.
I wonder what people think about this,
When I was first doing VMs, I would have the image in a file and it had to be stored somewhere.
All I would have in the file, would be an OS and maybe a couple apps installed.
Really only takes up a few GB of drive space as long as I don't try to store any massive or valuable data within the image.
I wouldn't want that kind of data in my images anyway.
And I had plenty of drive space so I didn't need any compression or space-saving measures to be applied for storing images.
In this case the working image takes up the exact same space on some drive either way.
Might as well let the image stay installed on its own partition so I could boot to it the bare metal way when I wanted to, or alternatively use it as a VM when re-booted to a powerful enough host OS which has been previously installed to a different partition.
Now in the terabyte world I've got more spare drive space than ever, and with GPT drive layout I can have as many partitions as I want.
Definitely learning as I go.
I know nothing about Ventoy, though.
A good example is VirtualBox Guest Additions that packs several drivers for multiple OSs in a single ISO and leverages the autorun mechanism to simplify automation for end users.
Uh what!? About every single Linux distro has .iso files available.
And it typically makes way more sense to dump the .iso to a USB stick than to an optical media because it speeds up the installation big times. That's the case for Ubuntu for example.
And an example as to why optical media are kinda falling into irrelevancy: some distro like Ubuntu ship an ISO that doesn't even fit on a DVD anymore. It is an ISO meant to be dumped to a USB stick, not an optical media.
Now of course the downsize is that there is something very nice when you burn an .iso to a write-once optical media: once you've verified that the disk's cryptographic checksum is correct, you know the disk's content won't change so there's no need to recheck it (at least not for security purposes).
With USB stick that's not the case.
> I know nothing about Ventoy, though.
...
That doesn't really mean much. The point is that there's practically only disadvantages to ISOs and using image files instead would make more sense nowadays.
Except burning to "legacy" optical media.
That can't be altered once burnt. If I could write it on a stone tablet I would (more durable).
Also the author comes off as arrogant/rude, calling people who don't like ISO as "older members". Maybe I'm "old" no longer being a twenty something, but I'm also not (yet) "old".
I guess it depends on how sensible different levels of reliability are for your particular application.
I mean, the author had gone into depth about this.
Absorbed it at the time and followed up with experimentation ever since.
Edit: experimentation was underway long before this was published.
there's also a Part 2:
https://bkhome.org/news/202112/why-iso-was-retired-part-2.ht...
>I have whittled away at the use-cases in favour of using the iso file,
Very well done, and I would rather not have to use ISO's myself since the only remaining thing they are perfect for is distribution, where it doesn't look like they will be beat for a very long time.
I would rather not touch ISOs any other time, but I'm going to have to maintain the skill anyway.
There's definitely nothing better for Windows than ISOs and Windows is huge with very sophisticated imaging built-in.
Kauler just happens to make an even more sophisticated IMG than most would do, for this distribution I can handle it with no drawbacks compared to a standard ISO file, and way better than a funky "hybrid" ISO.