Rufus: versionet e vjetra dhe historiku

- Add RISC-V 64 support to UEFI:NTFS
- Improve the guards for using the "silent" Windows installation option
- Improve the ability to cancel during write retries
- Improve progress reporting for compressed image extraction
- Fix unrestricted XML entity expansion and integer overflow in ezxml parser (courtesy of @esadowski4) [GHSA-55r2-34wg-8mv9]
- Fix "silent" Windows installation failing at 75% in most cases [#2960]
- Fix a crash during boot when using UEFI:NTFS on Snapdragon X based ARM64 platforms [#2934]
- Fix first WUE option always being checked by default [#2965]
- Fix an infinite loop when using Windows ISOs that contain multiple WIMs
- Fix "Enable runtime UEFI media validation" checkbox not always being properly enabled
- Other WUE improvements/fixes for OneDrive removal and username validation (with thanks to @christian8641) [#2984, #2991]

- Windows User Experience improvements:
- Add a "Quality of Life" option, to disable Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other Microsoft forced nuisances
- Add a Silent installation option, that automatically, and WITHOUT PROMPT, installs Windows on the first detected disk on the target platform
- Add an option to copy SkuSiPolicy.p7b to the ESP on installation (please refer to KB5042562 for more info)
- Add tooltips for all the dialog options
- Add limited support for El-Torito UEFI image extraction (Mostly for Dell BIOS update ISOs)
- Improve error report when the user tries to use an image that resides on the target drive
- Improve the UEFI:NTFS partition label to make the install media more explicit during Windows Setup disk partitioning
- Improve support for Bazzite and other Fedora derivatives that don't follow EFI conventions
- Improve reporting of GRUB and Isolinux MBRs
- Improve detection and exclusion of the new Bitdefender hidden VHDs (#2953)
- Fix potential errors during creation of Windows To Go media, due to the use of new versions of bcdboot (#2940)
- Fix errors with local accounts that start or end with whitespaces (#2950)

- Fix UEFI:NTFS not selecting the proper driver for ARM/ARM64
- Update embedded GRUB to v2.14

- Filter out the new Bitdefender VHDs
- Filter disallowed characters in local account names
- Improve Microsoft Dev Drive detection (#2873, courtesy of @MartinKuschnik)
- Improve the pre-formatting partition cleanup code
- Improve error reporting on ISO extraction issues
- Improve detection of drives with long hardware IDs (typically SSDs) (#2894)
- Improve conflicting process reporting
- Improve support for Nutanix (#2884) and umbrelOS ISOs
- Fix a TOCTOU vulnerability in Fido script execution (CVE-2026-2398, reported by @independent-arg)
- Fix replacement vulnerabilities for diskcopy.dll and oscdimg.exe
- Fix FFU image creation being erroneously invocated, when trying to save an ISO image (#2889)
- Fix saving of ISO images to paths that contain spaces (#2829)
- Update UEFI:NTFS and UEFI DBXs to latest

- Add a cheat mode (Ctrl-Alt-D) to toggle between Light and Dark mode (#2814)
- Improve WUE option text relating to the CA 2023 option
- Update Linux SBAT / Microsoft SVN Secure Boot revocation values to latest
- Fix some GRUB/Syslinux download dialogs showing only the 'Close' button (#2813)
- Fix an assert being triggered when using the WUE CA 2023 option on its own (#2815, #2818)
- Fix an application crash on systems that have a failed dynamic disk (#2794)

- Add a mechanism to detect and download updated DBXs from the official UEFI repository
- Add ztsd compression support for disk images
- Add a new exclusion feature in the settings, to ignore disks with a specific GPT GUID
- Improve detection for compressed VHD images that are too large to fit the target drive
- Fix commandline hogger not being deleted when running Rufus from a different directory
- Fix FAT filenames from embedded images being potentially truncated on image extraction
- Fix a side-loading vulnerability [CVE-2025-26624] with cfgmgr32.dll (with thanks to @EmperialX)
- Fix UI memory leaks (courtesy of @ozone10)
- Fall back to user/system default locale when getting error description (courtesy of @Wack0)
- Don't run the commandline hogger on POSIX shells
- Drop ARM 32-bit builds (Note that ARM 64-bit builds are NOT affected by this)
- Update FreeDOS and Grub4DOS to latest

- Add a new setup.exe wrapper to bypass Windows 11 24H2 in-place upgrade restrictions (#2568)
- Add TimeZone to regional options replication (#2499)
- Set local account passwords to not expire by default
- Fix an error when trying to write compressed VHD images (#2468)
- Fix an error when invoking Rufus from the PowerShell commandline (#2556)
- Improve revoked UEFI bootloaders check to support Linux SBAT, Windows SVN and cert DBX
- Improve support for ReactOS boot media (#2589)

- Add new advanced option to perform runtime UEFI media validation of suitable images (Windows, most Linux)
- Move the Use Rufus MBR advanced option to a cheat mode (Alt-A)
- Fix truncation of VHDX images, as well as a benign error message when writing VHD/VHDX (#2468)
- Fix support for Linux persistence in some configurations (Mint, Ubuntu 24.04)
- Fix multiple potential vulnerabilities (with thanks to Mansour Gashasbi)
- Update internal GRUB to version 2.12
- Update UEFI:NTFS to latest (now always uses the ntfs-3g driver, rather than the buggy AMI NTFS one)
- Increase buffer size when copying ISO files, in an attempt to minimize the AMI NTFS UEFI driver bug
- Improve partition creation handling
- Don't display the WUE dialog when a conflicting unattend.xml already exists (#2451)

- Add workaround for distros that use broken symbolic links as their UEFI bootloaders (such as Mint 21.3)
- Add support for GRUB 2.12
- Fix a crash when saving .ffu images
- Fix UEFI:NTFS partition not being added, in MBR mode, for some Linux ISOs
- Prevent Microsoft Dev Drives from being listed [#2395]
- Improve support for SDXC card readers
- Improve Large FAT32 formatting by aligning start of data regions to 1 MB (courtesy of Fred) [#2387]

- Add support for symbolic link preservation when NTFS is used
- Add an exception to enforce NTFS for Linux Mint's LMDE
- Add an expert feature to restrict a Windows installation to S Mode
- Fix persistence support for Debian 12 in BIOS mode
- Fix a regression that prevented the opening of .vhd images (#2309)
- Update UEFI:NTFS to report a more explicit error on bootmgr security issues
- Improve the search for conflicting processes, by running it in a background thread
- Improve support for Slax Linux (#2336)

- Add detection and warning for UEFI revoked bootloaders (including ones revoked through SkuSiPolicy.p7b) (#2244)
- Add ZIP64 support, to extract .zip images that are larger than 4 GB (#2264)
- Add saving and restoring current drive to/from compressed VHDX image
- Add saving and restoring current drive to/from compressed FFU (Full Flash Update) image [EXPERIMENTAL]
- Fix a crash when trying to open Windows ISOs, with the MinGW compiled x86 32-bit version (#2272)
- Fix an issue where ISOs that contain a boot image with an EFI label are not detected as bootable (#2288)
- Increase the ISO → ESP limit for Debian 12 netinst images
- Ensure that the main partition size is aligned to the cluster size

What's Changed
- Add timeouts on enumeration queries that may stall on some systems.
- Restore MS-DOS drive creation through the download of binaries from Microsoft.
- Update the log button icon.
- Fix UEFI:NTFS incompatibility with Windows Dev Kit 2023 platform (pbatard/uefi-ntfs#37).
- Fix more GRUB out of range pointer errors with Ubuntu/Fedora when booting in BIOS mode.

- Fix persistent partition not working with Ubuntu 23.04 (#2231)
- Fix out-of-range pointer error with Ubuntu 23.04 when booting in BIOS mode (#2233)
- Fix boot freeze with Ubuntu Studio when Secure Boot is enabled (#2210)
- Fix incorrect architecture detection when checking for updates
- Fix a Windows Store application crash when processing GRUB bootloaders
- Fix a Windows Store application crash when enumerating processes that contain a % sign
- Fix a Windows Store application crash when using German localization
- Note that the major version was bumped on account of:
- New versions of Rufus requiring Windows 8 or later
- New versions of Rufus defaulting to a 64-bit executable
- Old versions of Rufus potentially not being able to update properly

- Allow the provision of an arbitrary local account username in the Windows User Experience dialog
- Improve Windows version reporting from ISO/.wim
- Update UEFI:NTFS' NTFS drivers to v1.4 and exFAT drivers to v1.9
- Switch to remote download for nonstandard GRUB (Fedora 37, openSUSE Live, GeckoLinux)
- Fix UEFI:NTFS partition not being set in MBR mode for ISOs with a >4GB file (UwUntu)
- Fix GRUB support for Arch and derivatives, when a non FAT compliant label is used (#2086)
- Fix incorrect detection of GRUB with nonstandard prefixes
- Fix tab order not working on the Windows User Experience dialog

- Allow the provision of an arbitrary local account username in the Windows User Experience dialog
- Improve Windows version reporting from ISO/.wim
- Update UEFI:NTFS' NTFS drivers to v1.4 and exFAT drivers to v1.9
- Switch to remote download for nonstandard GRUB (Fedora 37, openSUSE Live, GeckoLinux)
- Fix UEFI:NTFS partition not being set in MBR mode for ISOs with a >4GB file (UwUntu)
- Fix GRUB support for Arch and derivatives, when a non FAT compliant label is used (#2086)
- Fix incorrect detection of GRUB with nonstandard prefixes
- Fix tab order not working on the Windows User Experience dialog