I tried netboot once, and lost interest when it took minutes to download an ISO over cable internet (DSL would be even worse) every singe time I tried booting into a live distro while debugging things. It's faster to download the ISOs I need ahead of time, save them on a Ventoy drive, and boot (and reboot) into each one in seconds.
I’ve found it to be much faster and far more convenient than downloading the image I want and writing it to a usb drive.
I did at one point keep a few stock images on my tftp server but even there, they would go out of date quicker than my need to use them. So I ended up sticking with NetBoot.xyz for convenience
How do I preload or cache ISOs on a flash drive holding the netboot.xyz client? I haven't seen any mention of it in docs. I've seen some people talking about setting up local iPXE servers, but I don't know if my machines always have functional networking to my server laptop during startup (and this fails outside my home network).
Netboot.xyz allows you to self-host an instance of it, which can cache ISOs. I was doing it for a time, and thought it neat, but not worth the hassle to keep running.
