Rufus 4.0 is a new version of this powerful tool for creating operating system installation media or, as the application’s own description says, «a tool that helps you format and create bootable USB mediasuch as flash drives, memory cards, etc.

Rufus is definitely the tool you use when you want to create a USB installer, whether it’s Windows or one of the many Linux distributions available. Rufus, yes, is an application for Windows, but not just any, but one of the best, one that we have been recommending for years, because what it does, it does very well.

And not only that: Rufus is an open source application, free software, although it is not available outside of Windows, which does not matter because there are alternatives for Linux, including Ventoy, the current reference for the specific model on which it is based , which makes it an ideal choice for the most demanding users in this kind of tasks, but also for the laziest.

However, we will not focus on this now. Now we’re talking about Rufus, whose last limitation is the same as Ventoy: help you “burn” your USB drives with the ISO of the day. How else are Ventoy and Rufus alike? In that both allow you to bypass both the Windows 11 requirements and Microsoft’s blocking of downloading it. It’s either one or the other, look no further.

Be that as it may, if Rufus and Ventoy are similar and different, you can now add Windows 7 support to the latter, which the new version of Rufus got rid of. As of Rufus 4.0, you will need to use Windows 8 or higher in order to run the application and not only that: it is noted that updating from previous versions may cause problems if the new requirements are not met.

The first of these requirements is related to the supported version of the operating system, and the second is related to the architecture of the application, which abandons 32-bit support and becomes a 64-bit applicationsomething that should also be taken into account to avoid problems or at least know where they come from.

Those are the two big news of Rufus 4.0. The rest, as detailed in the release notes, is reduced to bug fixes, some related to persistent storage in Ubuntu and especially the new version of the distribution, Ubuntu 23.04, others related to bugs in the Windows Store. At the same link you can find Rufus 4 installers for x86 and ARM in current and portable formats.

Rufus’ new requirements don’t meet your needs? Windy is the answer.