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…

  • davel@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    ♬ Hello dd my old friend
    I’ve come sudo with you again ♬

  • lime!@feddit.nu
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    1 month 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.

      • lime!@feddit.nu
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        1 month 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.

    • HelloRoot@lemy.lol
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      1 month 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@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 month 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!@feddit.nu
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        1 month 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.

        • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month 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.

    • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      If you actually read the post, you would have known, it does work, but there are some privacy concerns with it:

      “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.”

  • BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

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

      • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month 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…

      • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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        1 month 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.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month 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.

      • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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        1 month 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.

  • renzev@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I remember a while back, years before this surfaced, there was a thread on /g/ with a group photo of Balena’s employees and a caption like “why does it take so many people to develop an electron wrapper around dd”. Obviously it was low effort engagement bait (balena does much more than etcher), but the comments were full of people calling the company a glowie honeypot and the like. Moral of the story: Trust the schizos, they sense spyware form lightyears away.

  • SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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.

    • utubas@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      Ventoy uses several blobs without any instructions of compiling them yourself?

  • Majestic@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    Yet another reason for people to run a default prompt (deny until prompt answer) firewall.

      • Majestic@lemmy.ml
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        1 month 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.

      • 大きいBOY@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 month 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.

  • DaTingGoBrrr@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    balenaEtcher never worked for me. No image that I flashed has been usable to boot. The RPi imager has been working flawlessly

  • kepix@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

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

  • Just use dd. It’s not that hard. You pass it 2 arguments: if= the file you want to flash, and of= the destination. If you’re feeling fancy, pass in some status=progress. And don’t forget to prepend it with sudo. That’s it.

    • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      I just tried this the other day and was unable to boot from the USB. any chance you could shed some light on what i might have screwed up?

      The command was:

      dd if=fedora.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress
      

      The USB stick was not mounted and the fedora image was verified. The command completed successfully but I couldn’t boot from it. When I used fedora writer to burn the same image to the same USB stick it booted no problem.

      Edit: spelling

          • Rogue@feddit.uk
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            1 month ago

            You didn’t screw up, you beautifully proved why the CLI is never a simple solution.

            • Abnorc@lemm.ee
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              1 month ago

              This is why people trying to pass this as a primary option baffle me a bit. dd is not that bad in isolation, but all of these little commands add up.

              If we want Linux to be mainstream, we need to accept that most users aren’t going to be linux enthusiasts. They just want a PC that works normally.

        • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          I don’t think oflags=direct has any influence on the result. Apparently that’s about disabling the page cache in the kernel, which can avoid a situation in which the system slows down due to buildup yet-to-write pages.

          • massacre@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Perhaps not. But the flag allows for direct I/O for data, bypassing buffers which can be overrun with certain size blocks, potentially causing dirty buffer depending on the machine being used. My understanding is that it’s “more reliable” for writing (especially on shitty USB Flash drives) and getting the exact ISO properly written.

            But it could be useless all the same - I’m just pointing out that OPs command is not the one recommended by Fedora when writing their ISO. Also OP is less likely to pull the drive before buffers have flushed this way.

            • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
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              1 month ago

              Oh yeah that’s where I was getting at, but I didn’t have time to write that out earlier. I agree that OP probably pulled out the usb stick before buffers were flushed. I imagine that direct I/O would mitigate this problem a lot because presumably whatever buffers still exist (there would some hardware buffers and I think Linux kernel I/O buffers) will be minimal compared to the potentially large amount of dirty pages one might accumulate using normal cached writes. So I imagine those buffers would be empty very shortly (less than one second maybe?) after dd finishes, whereas I’ve seen regular dd finish tens of seconds before my usb stick stopped blinking it’s LED. Still if you wait for that long the result will be the same.

      • Maiq@lemy.lol
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        1 month ago

        Did you make sure that the of is correct? lsblk to make sure.

        If your sure it wrote to the right drive i would make sure that you have a good download. Did you run your checksums?

        I think fedora works with secureboot but you might want to disable it just to see if that is the issue. I believe you can reenable it after install.

        Make sure to go into the bios and boot from external drive/usb.

        Out of 15 years of using dd i have never had a problem.

        • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          I did verify with lsblk, with a listing before and after plugging in the stick to be absolutely sure.

          I also did verify the checksum of the ISO.

          I’ll double check SecureBoot, but as I mentioned, the same ISO written to the same stick with Fedora writer did boot in the same machine it wouldn’t boot from with the dd version.

          I know it’s something I did or didn’t do to make it work correctly, so this is not me trying to dunk on dd, just trying to understand what I did wrong.