Any new system I’ve used since about 2011 has been able to boot reliably from USB. The only issues really come down to how the thumb drive is prepared. Usually

Any new system I’ve used since about 2011 has been able to boot reliably from USB. The only issues really come down to how the thumb drive is prepared. Usually `dd` is good enough for Linux/Unix disk images, and preparing an exFAT/NTFS thumb drive (your mileage may vary on whether exFAT is supported on your system) and copying the contents over with `rsync` works good for windows 7+ images