The "Ventoy Update" post looks rather suspicious to me. The dev didn't respond to the GitHub issue, so this might just be some jackass pretending to be the dev.
But independently of that, the BLOBs are even more suspicious...
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Funny, I'm flashing a new PC as we speak and using dd instead of ventoy for this very reason. I've also used Balena Etcher in the past.
good 'ol dd, that's a good way to do it
Yeah, well... turns out the USB wasn't bootable (grub said it couldn't load the kernel) so I redid it with Balena and it worked fine.
I noticed yesterday that openSUSE specifically recommends not using Ventoy, due to possible boot issues: https://en.opensuse.org/Create_installation_USB_stick#Ventoy
Just use cp instead. No reason to use dd.
note that the blobs aren't unknown, they're builds of submodules that the developer hopefully hasn't added malware to
I wouldn’t trust it in its current state. Maybe things will get cleared up in time, maybe not.
With that said, how necessary is Ventoy, really? How much time & effort is it really saving you?
Not strictly necessary, but being able to carry all my ISOs on a single USB key saves me from having to redo the whole USB Stick Writer thingy every time. Is there another tool out there that does this and makes it easy for the plebs like myself?
It's solving a real problem in a niche case. Someone called it gimmicky, but it's actually just a good tool currently produced by an unknown quantity. Hopefully it'll be sorted or someone else takes up the reigns and creates an alternative that works perfectly for all my different isos.
For the average home punter maybe even up to home lab enthusiast, probably not saving much time. For me it's on my keyring and I use it to reload proxmox hosts, Nutanix hosts, individual Ubuntu vms running ROS Noetic and not to mention reimaging for test devices. Probably a thrice weekly thing.
So yeah, cumulatively it's saving me a lot of time and just in trivialising a process.
If this was a spanner I'd just go Sidchrome or kingchrome instead of my Stanley. But it's a bit niche so I don't know what else allows for such simple multi iso boot. Always open to options.
I mean, being able to carry a little thing with multiple OSs AND STILL being able to use it as portable storage for other stuff is really useful.
I understand how this could be a prime target of a supply chain attack and that things are a bit fishy. On the other hand people are waaaay less picky about installing other binary blobs on their machines. I wish paranoia would be more general :)
I stopped using Ventoy. I don't trust the OSs installed by means of it, sadly. Also, lost any hope of a clarification on the issue. Yes, you should not use it for the time being.
I will still use it for testing things, but I will no longer use it for installing the OS on a PC I'm going to use until they get the BLOB issue sorted out.
I mean it's just kinda gimmicky so with this added issue I just can't support it.
I've never felt the need for it and didn't know what it was til just now. dd'ing image files to USB drives has worked fine for me.