Not using Ventoy in 2025?
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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Balenaetcher has, for me at least, failed to write to USBs for the last 3 years or so that I've tried to use it - meanwhile random iso writers from flatpak have been more reliable for me. Very obnoxious that so many iso related sites recommend it. Rufus kicks tons of ass, if for whatever reason you're still on windows.
Also on most distros I've tried, the disk utility has some sort of right click or context menu that gets you a 'restore disk image' button that works great as well.
Edit= I used Popsicle USB writer from flatpak on steam deck with no issue today! Made by system76 (makers of popOS) and found on flatpak. It is absolutely no frills, but works well enough to write an SD card image for a raspberry pi! ๐
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Rufus is great! I worked with the maintainer to fix a bug in hardware they didn't have and it was a very pleasant experience.
Why use a fancy GUI tool when good old dd does the trick
Friendship ended with Balena
Now Rufus is my new best friend
Linux mint factory USB creator just right click and make bootable.
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.
Or gnome disks, which also adds an "open with 'write to drive'" option to isos and images
I dunno... I just use dd.
cat works perfectly fine too ๐
Eh, I prefer being able to specify block sizes, to maximize the throughput.
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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)
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.
Not used it since I discovered this nonsense. Shows how seriously they take security. https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3410