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…

  • lime!English
    30•2 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      20•2 months ago

      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.

      • SkaveRat
        15•2 months ago

        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

      • lime!English
        4•2 months ago

        that’s correct. on windows, rufus is a better tool, and on linux or mac it’s just a built-in command with a manual packed in.

        also, ubuntu ships with startup image creator, and gnome disks ships as a flatpak, if those are more your speed.

        • @[email protected]
          3•2 months ago

          Thanks for the info, I’m on linux mint and after checking these out it isn’t immediately apparent from their websites whether or how I could install them. Still think etcher occupies a niche that alternatives don’t fill, its website directs you straight to installing it, it’s cross platform, and using it is very easy, so it’s something that could reasonably be linked to in various install tutorials.

          • lime!English
            1•2 months ago

            on mint you install them as packages.

      • lime!English
        3•2 months ago

        weird that the installation guide is hosted on a separate website that hasn’t been updated in eight years. that’s irresponsible of them. anyway rufus is a better version of etcher that you can download for windows.

      • 大きいＢＯＹEnglish
        12•2 months ago

        Good question. I will attempt to clarify:

        OP is saying that individual should run firewalls on their machines, that block port activity by default, and only allow traffic upon an approved request by the administrator account.

      • @[email protected]
        4•2 months ago

        An interactive firewall.

        One that blocks programs from accessing the internet and prompts the first time they try until you click a button that says allow or you choose the alternative which is deny. A program like this you’d have no reason to give it internet access, it’s something whose operations should be entirely local.

  • Brickfrog
    57•2 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•2 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•2 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
          2•2 months ago

          I know, but just because someone doesn’t understand something or ignores it doesn’t mean it isn’t the best/simplest choice for 90% of cases.

      • @[email protected]
        2•2 months ago

        It’s faster to drag and drop a downloaded ISO and choose the target from a dropdown, than do it on a command line. And get a progress bar. As much as command line is usually faster, it isn’t in this case.

        Yes you can also get a progress bar on the command line but it’s more typing again, and realistically you need to look the option up every time if you use dd once every 3 months.

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

          Lmao. Uses a computer, typing is too much. It took more typing to write your comment than to craft a tab-completed dd command, even if you had to call the help menu to refresh your available options, jus’ sayin’

          I get it though, the general public are scared of the big bad 'puter magic and need GUIs.

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

              Shhh, that’s too advanced. Besides, CLI is outdated and slower than GUIs, this is just insane behavior /s

              I honestly didn’t even need to specify tab-completed. It’s still less typing than their comment unless your paths are miles long.

          • @[email protected]
            2•2 months ago

            Let me try: Lmao. Uses a computer, still does stuff the slower way because learning new things is too difficult.

            To be serious, I am looking for the best solutions for my use cases, not adequate ones. Yes dd works perfectly fine and as you noted doesn’t take long to use anyway. But just because it’s fine doesn’t mean other approaches aren’t better.

            A GUI tool can offer or take a list of download URLs for common distros so downloading isn’t a separate step, it can check if the target device is a flash drive and not a hard drive by mistake, it can automatically choose the optimal block size for the device, it can verify the process by reading it back from the device, can show you the current filesystem, label, and usage of the target device to confirm, it can handle flashing to multiple devices at the same time with separate and total progress bars.

            If I wanted to do all that on the command line it’d be quite a lot of commands or a sizeable script to write. Or I can use a simple dd command and lose out on all of the above. Either way it’s a worse option. I will only use dd when a GUI tool isn’t installed, or when I’m on a system without a DE.

            • @[email protected]English
              1•2 months ago

              We will have to agree to disagree.

              At least you came back with reasons beyond “I don’t like typing.”

              ETA: > learning new things is too difficult.

              I could use this argument for folks that don’t want to learn CLI as well, doesn’t really track in either direction.

    • @[email protected]
      7•2 months ago

      It is indeed the best way, but somehow I am still anxious using this command, even after flashing countless USB drives 😅

      • @[email protected]
        3•2 months ago

        I’ve made it a habit to type out the command without sudo at first, then when it yells at me about permissions I am reminded to go back and double-check.

  • @[email protected]English
    10•2 months ago

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

  • @[email protected]
    22•2 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.

  • 𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒆𝒍English
    9•2 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•2 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•2 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•2 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]
        3•2 months ago

        Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize you were on Windows. That’s a Linux command. I haven’t used Windows very much since about 2018, so I don’t even consider Windows anymore unless it’s brought up.

      • @[email protected]
        5•2 months ago

        Rufus.

        And who cares if there’s spyware on windows, you’re already using windows so there is, it’s windows. At that point you may as well just use etcher, but I’d use Rufus anyway because let’s be real it’s just better. The only reason not to use Rufus is because it’s windows exclusive, but if you’re using windows that probably doesn’t bother you, so…

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

      In my early days of Linux, I royally fucked up a USB thumb drive (back when they were expensive) using dd and as a result do not trust myself with it.

      I would use Hannah Montana Linux if it was the only GUI option to burn a USB ISO.

      • @[email protected]
        2•2 months ago

        Weird. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve used that command. But it’s probably been several thousand. And I’ve never screwed up a flash drive that way.

        There has been once or twice where I’ve pulled the flash drive out too quickly after it finished writing and it actually hadn’t finished writing and had to redo it, but other than that, I’ve not actually screwed up any drives beyond repair or anything.

  • ☂️-
    16•2 months ago

    what is a good one to use, is there something like rufus on linux

      • ☂️-
        1•2 months ago

        is there something special needed for windows isos, it doesnt seem to want to boot for me

    • yeehaw
      3•2 months ago

      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.

      • ☂️-
        2•2 months ago

        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.

      • lime!English
        2•2 months ago

        i’ve never needed to set a single flag with dd. i just do if=the_iso of=the_disk. what flags?

        • yeehaw
          2•2 months ago

          Don’t you need to mark usb disks as bootable if you want to boot from them to install Linux or whatever

          • @[email protected]
            1•2 months ago

            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.

            • yeehaw
              1•2 months ago

              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

          • lime!English
            3•2 months ago

            that’s not something i’ve ever had to do, i’ve only done that for hard drives.

  • @[email protected]
    45•2 months ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
    21•2 months ago

    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.