I never used Rufus but I prepared USB sticks few times. Here're my observations:
1. Every computer I've used supports NTFS in its UEFI. I even thought it was standard. So simplest way to create a bootable USB stick: format it with GPT, create one big enough NTFS partition and copy ISO contents inside. That's it.
2. Converting install.wim to sub-4GB chunks is trivial one command. Create one big FAT32 partition, copy all but install.wim, convert install.wim with `dism` and copy it.
That's it. Much easier and faster than using some tool doing strange things with shim loaders and whatnot.
Linux sticks could be created exactly the same way. UEFI is awesome.
> Every computer I've used supports NTFS in its UEFI. I even thought it was standard.
I've never seen a motherboard supporting anything else than FAT for an UEFI partition. What is likely happening is that you're booting using a small EFI System Partition (ESP) formatted in FAT32 which contains a bootloader with an NTFS driver.
It can get confusing because the EFI bootloader generally registers new boot entries for each non-ESP partition, but these are booting the ESP with the selected partition GUID.
I'm pretty sure it didn't happen because I partitioned disk myself using diskpart and I did not create any small partition with bootloader or whatever. Just one 10GB NTFS partition and copy files from mounted ISO to this partition using ordinary explorer Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V.
I've used that with few Asus motherboards (I prefer this brand) and one dell laptop. They were 2015+, so relatively modern, I guess.
> I've never seen a motherboard supporting anything else than FAT for an UEFI partition.
I've seen exactly one model line, that does support NTFS in UEFI: Intel NUCs. It was quite nice, but nobody preparing boot media can rely on the availability, as the only mandatory filesystem is FAT32.
1. Every computer I've used supports NTFS in its UEFI. I even thought it was standard. So simplest way to create a bootable USB stick: format it with GPT, create one big enough NTFS partition and copy ISO contents inside. That's it.
2. Converting install.wim to sub-4GB chunks is trivial one command. Create one big FAT32 partition, copy all but install.wim, convert install.wim with `dism` and copy it.
That's it. Much easier and faster than using some tool doing strange things with shim loaders and whatnot.
Linux sticks could be created exactly the same way. UEFI is awesome.
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