- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I am shocked by this - the quote in below is very concerning:
“However, in 2024, the situation changed: balenaEtcher started sharing the file name of the image and the model of the USB stick with the Balena company and possibly with third parties.”
Can’t see myself using this software anymore…
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Is no one aware of Fedora Media Writer? It’s FOSS and the most trustworthy ISO burning software in existence. It’s only issue is that its named as if it is written only for producing Fedora bootable media. It works for everything.
Meh i find it slow.
Opensuse has one too. And dd exists for the brave or the foolish
The article at the end mentions they suggest dd as alternative for MacOS (due to Unix user space). It seems the balena -> rufus decision is about the easiest-onramp Mac+Win-portable option, for those uncomfortable dropping to low-level device-writing CLI tools in their current system.
Side-note: Last time I was on a friend’s Windows I installed dd simply enough both as mingw-w64 (native compiled) and under Cygwin. So for Windows users who are comfortable using dd it only requires a minor step. When I once used WSL devices were accessible too, but that was WSL1 (containerized), whereas WSL2 (virtualized) probably makes device-mapping complex(?) enough to not be worth it there.
WSL2 has relatively easy (a few powershell commands iirc) device mounting, provided you aren’t trying to mount C: or the windows install drive (not necessarily the same).
Thanks, that’s good to know, but for raw-writing a bootable image to a device do you (or anyone reading) know if there are also straightforward powershell commands for mapping devices at the block level? (as opposed to mounting at filesystem level)
I dunno… I just use dd.
cat works perfectly fine too 👌
Eh, I prefer being able to specify block sizes, to maximize the throughput.
Seeing progress, too
Or gnome disks, which also adds an “open with ‘write to drive’” option to isos and images
i still had issues using 150MB electron based bloated and heavy software instead of rufus, not that it worked for me anyway
I only tried to use it once, and same. 150MB of a Web app to copy an ISO? I think I was using a Macbook to flash it and decided to use ventoy instead, with my PC.
I understand that it needed a GUI, but 150 megs?? When :
~ ❯ ll `which dd` -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 63K Sep 29 16:36 /usr/bin/dd* ~ ❯Yeah Mac has dd too, I often forget about the terminal existing there. I wish Ventoy for Mac was a thing tho.
what is a good one to use, is there something like rufus on linux
Can always use dd but I always go stupid when I need to set boot flags and all that crap, which is so much easier with etcher. I think I’ve done dd with gparted in the past.
does gparted set the correct flags too, can it also do windows
i just want a dumb ui i can dumbly drag the iso file to and it takes care of everything for me.
i’ve never needed to set a single flag with dd. i just do
if=the_iso of=the_disk. what flags?Don’t you need to mark usb disks as bootable if you want to boot from them to install Linux or whatever
i think it depends on the image you get - for archlinux you can simply cat (or dd) the file onto a usb stick and it works perfectly fine, bootable. but i think i have seen an image at some point where it didn’t work, but i don’t recall what it was.
It won’t depend. I think it’s because back in the day we never had an easy way to force boot a device, if a device wasn’t flagged as bootable it wouldn’t boot
that’s not something i’ve ever had to do, i’ve only done that for hard drives.
https://circle.gnome.org? Never tried their ISO software, I just use dd.
I just use Gnome Disks for convenience over dd.
is there something special needed for windows isos, it doesnt seem to want to boot for me
If you need a FOSS, cross platform GUI for bootable USB sticks, Raspberry Pi Imager is a really good solution.
It is mainly used to flash SD cards for RPIs, but also you can burn any ISO on any support with it.I used to use the fedora media writer but the RPi imager software is so easy I switched
Ventoy is life!
Real
did they ever clear up that random unexplained binaries issue?
From what I could gather, they’re taken from Fedora and OpenSUSE. They’re signed blobs for secure boot support.
I tried belenaEtcher once on my Mac… And it seemed to me more like a spyware than an actual software, I was a bit confused and never used it again.
Thats a shame, it was one of the few disk imagers that “just worked”
Not used it since I discovered this nonsense. Shows how seriously they take security. https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3410
deleted by creator
I knew that UI had something to hide!
Never trust an overly fancy UI…
nah, plenty of good stuff with good ui.
balena had effects and stuff but a pretty tasteless gui tbh, and ads promoting other shit…
balenaEtcher never worked for me. No image that I flashed has been usable to boot. The RPi imager has been working flawlessly
Thank you for pointing it out.
Linux mint factory USB creator just right click and make bootable.
Generally Ventoy is better than both. Choose a dedicated flash storage, flash Ventoy to it, then click and drag as many ISO’s as can fit on your drive and you can boot from any one of them at any time.
Much better than Etcher or Rufus, IMO.
Who tf is downvoting? Ventoy is the best
I’m guessing the people aware of Ventoy’s undocumented binary blob.
From literally the same thread: https://lemm.ee/comment/14867214
Ahh too bad because balenaEtcher just werks for me.
If you actually read the post, you would have known, it does work, but there are some privacy concerns with it:
“However, in 2024, the situation changed: balenaEtcher started sharing the file name of the image and the model of the USB stick with the Balena company and possibly with third parties.”
I did read the post before constructing my comment and that’s why I feel sad for seeing privacy concerns popping up at balena, because that’s just my fav.
