Tails no longer recommending balenaEtcher

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.

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

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.

Thats a shame, it was one of the few disk imagers that "just worked"

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

Friendship ended with Balena

Now Rufus is my new best friend

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

Is no one aware of Fedora Media Writer? It's FOSS and the most trustworthy ISO burning software in existence. It's only issue is that its named as if it is written only for producing Fedora bootable media. It works for everything.

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.

Not using Ventoy in 2025?

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.

Why use a fancy GUI tool when good old dd does the trick

dd

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! 🙂

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.

I knew that UI had something to hide!

Never trust an overly fancy UI...

Linux mint factory USB creator just right click and make bootable.

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.

Ventoy is life!

Sudo dd if=tails.iso of=/dev/sdb

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.

Not used it since I discovered this nonsense. Shows how seriously they take security. https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3410

Happy user of Ventoy here

Honestly, if you're using Windows, then you most likely already sent any and all of your secrets to Microsoft anyway. Including that you installed Tails.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I mean for privacy things it makes sense to avoid leaking anything. But I fail to understand where the danger is to have anonymous data that says a user installed "Ubuntu-24.04-wappity-whatever.iso" to "KINGSTON DATA TRAVELER 32GB" at some point.

Thank you for pointing it out.

Ahh too bad because balenaEtcher just werks for me.

What options are there for flashing to SD cards? Something that works on Mac too would be nice. A gui is preferred.

Doesn't the official guide recommend using GNOME Disk Utility anyway?

Glad I saw this. I downloaded the tool on recommendation from a forum post when I was reviving my homelab. I’ll nuke it for sure.

The MX Linux live USB maker should work well on Debian based distros.

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

I've been avoiding it ever since the Balena moniker change.

dd

...and that's how I met your mother fork