Hi @trawglodyte and thanks for your update.
Couple of issues
You say in step 6 for PUP to look for "sessions"; then in a later step you go looking for "Sessions"??? Linux is case-sensitive for file/folder names. But I think you know that so what you published must be a typo.
It seems we are mixing understanding of what this is all about, so correct me if I'm wrong. There are 2 distinctly different things that seemingly is constantly being mixed; Booting and Session management. They are NOT related. Booting is the combination task where the ISO files is launched. Session and session-management is governed by either a parm or preset in a distro's menu.
4Tom -EV ===> https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/09/googl ... with-ford/
Booting
Booting and ISO file selections is the task of Ventoy/SG2D. They merely are ISO/IMG file launchers. SG2D is necessary as some of the WoofCE PUPs will struggle or fail when launched via Ventoy. This phenomenon is known. SG2D does not struggle. In Ventoy, some distro fail by dropping to a grub/linux prompt rather than desktop or worst. For those times, SG2D launches sometime overcomes that behavior. If this occurs in SG2D launches, there is something wrong in the actual distro's INIT...not anything to do with the launchers.
Session Management
This is controlled by the distros themselves with multiple forum distros providing their parms to control where session placement is to occur. The SAVESPEC is a WoofCE feature that takes the place of the need to specify the psave=
parm. If you looked at it, as suggested, you can envision the similarities to each other.
I think your efforts are helping me to rethink how this is presented to the community of users as it "seemingly" have gotten mixed such that it became complex for you.
What has been proven over the years is the following;
A forum distro's ISO file AND its session is a fully functions frugal operation of the distro containing ALL of the expected use of the distro. This ISO file-session is a total PUP; WITHOUT having to unpack and edit configs or grub stanzas to get to a PUP's desktop. Thus this eliminate where user setups can go wrong and is cause for having user appeals to forum just to get their PUP's operational on there system. ONCE the PC environment is setup, it becomes a download and boot environment versus a download and play around with all the past work for something as simple as a frugal.
This is not complicated, nor complex
We have a boot device AND we have a session device. That's all there is to this. It has been made easy by giving 2 folder names that makes sense of their use. Again, that's all there is to this. Its not fancy; not laborious, IMHO.
So maybe what got you running into issues is the way I have explained. This suggests I need to change the way it has been explained.
What I wanted users to understand is
A "simple easy to envision" use of the boot media (Ventoy and a setup that works for both Ventoy and SG2D)
A "simple easy to envision" partition's setup for a planned location of all forum distro sessions
These 2 things, boot-media and place for sessions, are unchanged for the life of the user/system going forward; unchanged meaning you set each device up once (forever more).
When this is done, the arrangement now become a simple download an ISO file to the boot media and boot. They are instantly running frugal!
This download and boot has been tested since 2019 for every forum distro I have found and works as describe earlier in this paragraph. I do nothing more, no changes to files, no pre-modification of environment, no magic "slight of hand"...nothing. I just launch the ISO file with NO intermediate step(s) to a frugal desktop operation. "Simple!"