i still don't understand why anyone would use etcher. it's an electron wrapper over dd. it's 80MB where rufus is 1.5. when it appeared there were already other programs that did its job better.
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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I like clicking buttons that have a text on them saying what they do instead of trying to memorize a gajillion terminal commands and flags where I have to enter more commands and flags to see what they do.
plus it's some some sanity checks like not showing you your system drives. Or warning you when the drive you are about to nuke is suspiciously large and maybe not the usb drive you actually want to use.
This is basically the main feature. Stopping you from fatfingering the wrong drive
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Not used it since I discovered this nonsense. Shows how seriously they take security. https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3410
Yet another reason for people to run a default prompt (deny until prompt answer) firewall.
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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.
Happy user of Ventoy here
Good luck with the binary blob!
For some more context:
https://lemmy.one/post/19193506
💀💀 seems like dd commands and gnome's MultiWriter might be the only ways to flash stuff on linux
Fedora Writer is another one (also works on Windows and maybe Mac), and there's also GLIM for multiboot, similar to Ventoy.
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I thought the binary blob thing was explained?
Basically UEFI booting requires shims and those need to be signed so the Ventoy author is re-using the ones from Fedora and OpenSUSE. This can be verified by comparing hashes, which the author of that comment shows how to do.
This whole thing seems to come down to people freaking the F out because they don't understand how the software works and the Author of the software is currently PO'd off at the community and stopped answering questions.
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Last I heard it was also suspect: Ventoy source code contains some unknown BLOBs, still no word on the issue from the dev after months
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have they tried also tracking for errors, cause it fucks up every second image unlike rufus
Truth. Etcher is garbage. Rufus is king.
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.
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