1- download iso
2- format usb with fat32
3- copy the data
Apparently you can't just dd the ISO file into the USB block device like every other Linux or BSD ISO. It need to be FAT32 to be able to boot through UEFI.
The issue however is that the .wim file containing the OS installation source is bigger than 4GB. I think its sources.wim but I'm not sure. I had to install some command line utility from brew that did the job of "optimizing" the WIM file and managed to reduce it to a file bellow 4GB.
What does optimizing means? Better compression? Cleaning up crap inside the image? If their ISO tool probably does this without user interaction then why include a file bigger than what the FS can handle in the first place?
I don't know if this counts as some kind of dark pattern or MS being really antiquated in terms of bootable flash drivers.
Trouble is , FAT32 has more OS compatibility.
Would be nice if Linux did have first class support for NTFS as itβs superior. But right now for maximum compatibility you need FAT32
FAT16 is limited to 2GB, FAT32 can extend to 2TB (but the max file size for a single file is 4GB, as the parent stated)
it doesn't in spec, that's just the win32 API
NTFS filename length is limited to 255 Unicode chars.
You may be thinking of full path lengths of 32,767 Unicode chars but the filename component is still limited to 255.
If you look at the NTFS data structure "$FILE_NAME (0x30)" at byte offset 0x40: https://www.google.com/search?q=ntfs+%22%24FILE_NAME%22+byte
... there's only 1 byte used to describe the filename length. Hence max of 255 chars.
Wikipedia page about NTFS also mentions 255 max length for filename: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS