rEFInd
You might find that using 'rEFInd' will allow you to boot your wife's Acer laptop without a tiny USB stick.
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REFInd
Actual website: https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
It is not a simple proposition*, but as a reader and commentator on 'El Reg', you probably have the smarts to deal with it.
I have an Acer laptop where the UEFI is set up to expect only the Windows EFI module. If you replace that module with the rEFInd module, you can then subsequently choose to boot any available Operating System from a convenient menu. The Acer UEFI is not standards compliant as it should correctly boot with a module placed in the fallback default location if there is not one in the (Windows) standard location, but it doesn't. I also have to disable Secure Boot via a non-intuitive process.
*It involves mucking about with the contents of the EFI System Partition, and modifying NVRAM UEFI boot variables. If you get it wrong, it might brick the system unrecoverably. In principle, you can use GRUB2 as a boot manager also, but I've not got a large enough collection of round tuits to have a go at doing that yet.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
