Windows ISO files are iso9660, so you cannot "burn them" into the usb; only to optical drive.
For USB, Microsoft provides media creation tool, which will format the usb to FAT32, and then copy the files there. As said elsewhere in this thread, it will use esd instead of wim container, which has better compression, so it will fit.
The install USB can be neither NTFS nor exFAT, because neither of these filesystems are recognized by UEFI (as mandatory filesystem, by UEFI spec; yes, some implementations can recognize NTFS, but as a system vendor, you cannot rely on that). So if you want to boot it on a all systems, FAT32 is it.
He is wrong; UEFI does specify FAT (section 13.3). It does not prevent supporting other filesystems, as well as other partition schemes or volume formats (nothing prevents UEFI from supporting LVM, for example), but only FAT and GPT are mandatory (i.e. "must"). Thus only FAT and GPT are implemented in 100% of shipped computers.
Yes, you can get Intel NUC and yes, it does support NTFS in UEFI. It is also compliant with UEFI (i.e. "can"). But is is completely useless, if you are shipping media, that should be bootable by 100% of UEFI-using machines. It is usefull, only when you are targeting such machines specifically.
He frames it differently; more optimistic than the reality on the ground. He is also conflating things in a way that does not work (just because Intel ships something does not means that it is a standard to benchmark compliance to spec against it; it creates unnecessary confusion. Intel has a right to implement things above the spec, but it does not mean that spec mandates such things).
You can ship your own filesystems, volume managers, device drivers... but they should be signed with a key trusted by Secure Boot, if you want them to be useful at all. Most users are not going to disable SB for your snowflake of efi binary; especially if it is OS installer.
As a result, nobody (nobody in Spolsky's sense) really bothers. When you are shipping bootable media, fat is good enough. It will boot your binary, do stuff it is supposed to do, and everybody goes on with their lives.
> Most users are not going to disable SB for your snowflake of efi binary; especially if it is OS installer.
We have very different experiences, I must say. Mine is that Linux installers that do support Secure Boot are having to go out of their way to point that out to users because people are just disabling secure boot as step 0 by default.
That same page claims that disabling secure boot is no longer necessary (though most users are in fact used to it by now). It very much seems like the feature does actually just work in most cases.
> He is wrong; UEFI does specify FAT (section 13.3).
He literally addresses that. Saying that the one thing the Spec does is require that, at the very least, you can boot from FAT32.
When he says the spec doesn't require FAT32, he means nothing in the spec says your device itself should be FAT32 and that it's fully conformant to use a UEFI:NTFS driver to load from a USB stick.
And the only reason some UEFI implementsions support NTFS is as usual because of MS's monopoly. They don't have to specify it as the standard, it just becomes one.
Heck, NTFS is more commonly supported on UEFI implementstions than exFAT is, even when there is no free (as in gratis) implementation of the former, but there are several for the latter.
Of course you can. I open rufus, and I "burn" the ISO to the USB drive. I don't know if you are referring to a more specific process, or a different process, but the ISO is then copied to the USB, and I can boot from it, install windows, and even browse the files.
For USB, Microsoft provides media creation tool, which will format the usb to FAT32, and then copy the files there. As said elsewhere in this thread, it will use esd instead of wim container, which has better compression, so it will fit.
The install USB can be neither NTFS nor exFAT, because neither of these filesystems are recognized by UEFI (as mandatory filesystem, by UEFI spec; yes, some implementations can recognize NTFS, but as a system vendor, you cannot rely on that). So if you want to boot it on a all systems, FAT32 is it.