> No ISO! ISO for optical media is a legacy format.
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.
Sole by-the-book CD/DVD image with a corresponding specific boot loader (e. g. isolinux) with installation environment which expects to access its files on a real optical drive through regular bundled ODD drivers would be almost completely useless today. To make such disks — installation media for systems released before widespread support of USB boot — work without real CD/DVD-ROM, you need to emulate BIOS functions and/or compatible device, and also keep the whole image at hand, most likely by copying it to memory in full, to provide data for reading, then boot the installer into that partially virtualized environment. Even older systems (before standardization of CD booting) may additionally need boot floppy emulation.
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.
Ventoy and flash tools should in theory support img files just fine, if anything for virtual machines img files should be easier to boot than ISOs (don't need to emulate a CD drive)
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).
"In theory" being the key word here. For whatever reason, it's a pita to use raw images with both virtualbox and VMware. You have to resort to third party command line tools to convert the image (qemu-img).
Exactly. And it's not like they'd need to ship two versions of the installer; a single hybrid ISO that works both ways is what basically every other distro already does.
I could never remember all that and I would always have to refer to documentation to know how to write out the full commands.
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.
Yes, these commands have way too many options for anyone to remember. The commands are best wrapped up in a script. An ISO install is usually a manual process that can take time, but it is definitely easier.
waiy what? you don't need to learn complicated commands.
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.
It is e.x.a.c.t.l.y the same. Instead of selecting an image for the virtual dvd drive, you select an image for the hard drive, or an image for an usb drive. It is as fast and as simple either way with the advantage of not having to go through the install process if you just start fe the hard drive image. The downside possibly being download size compared to say, downloading a netboot iso that will install the latest packages from the very start.
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.
ISOs make little sense over a regular disk or filesystem image for just about every use case except burning to optical media, a use case I understand to be quite rare (but not completely gone) nowadays.
Optical media was designed for distribution, ISOs and their use cases evolved around the same goal.
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.
> ISOs make little sense over a regular disk or filesystem image for just about every use case except burning to optical media ...
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).
> Uh what!? About every single Linux distro has .iso files available.
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.
> The point is that there's practically only disadvantages to ISOs
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 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.
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.