Tails - Replacing balenaEtcher with Rufus as installer for Windows
tails.net

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…

  • @[email protected]English
    10•4 months ago

    have they tried also tracking for errors, cause it fucks up every second image unlike rufus

    • Pup BiruEnglish
      12•4 months ago

      did they ever clear up that random unexplained binaries issue?

      • Meshuggah333
        3•4 months ago

        From what I could gather, they’re taken from Fedora and OpenSUSE. They’re signed blobs for secure boot support.

  • xttweaponttx
    13•4 months ago

    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! 🙂

      • xttweaponttx
        3•4 months ago

        😂 I also read this as Ron’s voice!

        Nah as much as i love doing stuff via terminal, I am extra paranoid specifically about writing to the wrong device and losing data; I prefer as many confirmations as possible that I’m writing to the correct drive, and graphical installers tend to give me just a few more reassurances. A few examples would be stuff like

        • a graphical representation of partitions (the general layout of a drive tends to offer an easy ‘fingerprint’ in my mind; like the pattern of partitions help me confirm I’m looking at, say, a Debian install USB compared to a single-partition general purpose storage disk)
        • icons for different types of devices, like an SD card, USB, or hard disk icon
        • confirmation dialogues summarizing what device is targeted, and what all will be performed

        I’m also the kind of person who stares at a written email worrying about every last nuance of my phrasing, so 🤷‍♂️😂 definitely a me problem, I think!

  • OcéaneFrançais
    1•4 months ago

    Unrelated to balenaEtcher but I haven’t been able to flash ISO files from Windows 11, either by using Rufus, Etcher, Fedora Media Writer, or even the WSL. I need to borrow a computer running a FLOSS operating system or to install OpenBSD first, and then from OpenBSD to download and burn an ISO file.

    • @[email protected]
      2•4 months ago

      That sounds like an issue with your computer rather than W11. I just used Etcher on my W11 desktop to flash Mint XFCE yesterday with no issues.

      • OcéaneFrançais
        1•4 months ago

        Thanks for the tip, I’ll try that with different computers.

  • 𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒆𝒍English
    9•4 months ago

    i still had issues using 150MB electron based bloated and heavy software instead of rufus, not that it worked for me anyway

    • @[email protected]
      1•4 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•4 months ago

        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*

~ 
❯
        • @[email protected]
          1•4 months ago

          Yeah Mac has dd too, I often forget about the terminal existing there. I wish Ventoy for Mac was a thing tho.

  • @[email protected]
    16•4 months ago

    Here’s a wildcard people might not know about: Raspberry Pi Imager

    I use it because it’s faster than Etcher and it also has a bunch of quick links to download popular images (mainly for RPI and other arm-based SBCs) in one click which is handy if you use those regularly.

  • @[email protected]
    15•4 months ago

    Wow, I was not aware of that. I really liked balena. Thankfully, I haven’t been using it since installing Mint.

  • Brickfrog
    57•4 months ago

    That’s interesting, apparently it was mentioned on github but nothing seems to have changed in the end

    https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3784

    Haven’t used that software in a long time but maybe there’s an opt-out somewhere during runtime? Although I don’t see why a user needs to be required to opt out of nonsense like this when just writing firmware to a USB disk.

    Only ever touched balenaEtcher when some project or distro recommended it. Overall prefer Rufus for this sort of thing when working on Windows.

    • @[email protected]English
      7•4 months ago

      I’ve used Sardu on Windows for making multi-iso bootable USB sticks a long time ago in the past, but I’d admittedly never looked at their ToS or Privacy Policy. My use case was slapping some live boot antivirus scanners, data recovery tools, and one or two lightweight liveboot-Linux ISOs on one USB as a portable toolkit.

      When I’m making anything else from Windows, I’ve always stuck with Rufus. Had never heard of BalenaEtcher before now.

      • @[email protected]
        5•4 months ago

        I"m horrible with names of programs and mess with a lot of junk comps switching out OS’s and just tinkering around so I’m always using crazy utility programs. BalenaEtcher is used in a lot of tutorials or guides for installations, I think recently both Elementary OS and even Ubuntu had instructions pointing towards BalenaEtcher.

        I never thought it was a great program, it was finicky to use and errors out quickly multiple times. Looking back I saw the signs, weird new program being promoted above other “well established” burn programs, ads, and now scrolling down their webpage it’s just a bunch of promotional subscription bullshit. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit looking at the “balenacloud” and “balenasense”, like if they’re collecting your data through etcher then all of that shit is probably compromised. Another fucking google wannabe corp.

  • @[email protected]English
    17•4 months ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
    22•4 months ago

    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.