Since the advent of bootable ISOs on disc and then large USB flash drives, I haven't bothered with any kind of recovery options on my computer, and now actively remove them. See recovery partitions, recovery kernel (on fedora) etc, etc.
Feels redundant, and I enjoy having the disk space back. An external flash boot drive has saved me countless times, and is useful for other stuff.
On it I now use Ventoy, which I heartily recommend. So much better than imaging the whole drive.
Ventoy is great[0], but with laptops easily having 2TB for cheap nowadays, leaving room for a sub-1GB ISO on the boot partition is not really space that would be missed. I also feel that any time one really needed an ISO, no flash drive near me ever had the right one.
[0]: ... when installed, but the installation process is awful. For GPT, it's just a FAT partition with the ESP flag and a few Ventoy files on it, and yet you need to run "installers" as root to "prepare" the drive. It should just have been a tarball and a few trivial commands - not a thousand lines of bash shelling out to a custom C partitioning tool...
I have lot of multi GB movies/series in process at any time so always short on space and don’t want to lock it up in another partition.
You just put several isos on it once a year. It’s usually not installed, just run. Any live distro can download additional tools as needed. And really any from the last five years are fine, partition tools and text editors haven’t innovated recently. Maybe you’d want the latest btrfs tools possibly, if so download.
A cheap 64GB! flash drive dedicated to the purpose and put on a keychain works well. Think I looked for 32GB but needed to go 64 to get usb3.2+ transfer speed, which I also recommended. Still so cheap!
Great for test driving new distros too.
I agree about ventoy, but only had to install it once, and already blocked it out, haha. Hopefully someone strips it down and adds a lite version to debian.
Feels redundant, and I enjoy having the disk space back. An external flash boot drive has saved me countless times, and is useful for other stuff. On it I now use Ventoy, which I heartily recommend. So much better than imaging the whole drive.