Balena-etcher bug or not?

I wanted to try balena-etcher and it took a very long time to load. once installed it started and the window remained white even after restarting the system. so i installed and tested imagewriter which worked great. I don’t know if this is a bug but I wanted to report it.

Don’t use Balena Etcher, it utter rubbish.

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Just FYI, I don’t know why but when using popsicle it takes a couple of minutes to write my iso to usb whereas imagewriter takes 5-10min. Although both are fine and never got a corrupted usb or problem with iso.

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Popsicle is great. I typically use Ventoy, but when it does not work with a specific ISO, I use either dd or Popsicle.

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Also discovered Ventoy a couple of weeks ago, awesome to load a couple of different ios on my usb stick!

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Yeah, Ventoy is fantastic in theory, but in practice, it often does not work. With some versions of EndeavourOS ISO in particular. It’s always hit and miss with Ventoy, unfortunately.

I like your style!
Screenshot from 2021-09-18 17-21-25

Posicle is great! I used to use etcher and never had any issues. But not lately so that could have changed. It is my choice on Windows though.

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I use Suse Image Writer for putting ISOs on usb. I just wish it let me do Windows ISOs for when i help microsoft folks.

oh dear god, 223mb for an image writer?

now im curious how big the suse one is?

EDIT: 237kb :metal:

I use Mintstick USB formater and USB image writer. They are small, fast, and never fail. Also, the plain old dd command works like a charm.

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The BalenaEtcher Appimage is 89 MB
The debian package is 82 MB
And etcher-bin-1.5.122-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is also only 89 MB.

etcher is an electron app and electron apps tend to be a little bigger than other apps.

I used etcher last week several times and it works just fine. I like the user interface :blush:

Hi @Kresimir
the installation of popsicle yay -S popsicle contains lots of errors and in the end does not work for me. I tried popsicle-git yay -S popsicle-git and it works fine

Re Etcher: It’s for people who don’t use lsblk to first check the connected drives. I was that person on one occasion, but I can reinstall Arch Linux in a few minutes so no harm done - really!

@davidw why are you assuming that Etcher is the only ISO image writer with a GUI? It’s a false dichotomy.

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There are plenty of GUI image writers

Gnome Multi Writer
Suse Image Writer
unetbootin

just to name a couple

I have no issue with etcher. I have used it more than 500 times. I now use popsicle on linux but still use etcher on Windows if needed.

Suse Image Writer for me since about 2012 (approx). It’s always worked so I ain’t gonna change unless it stops working. I’ve got Etcher & Unetbootin on an old MacBook but I haven’t used those for years. Etcher does seem like massive bloat, it’s like Adobe for image writing! :grin:

I use etcher-bin and I have no issues with it. But as i say i switched to popsicle on Linux. Honestly i think I’ve used dd once or twice. :laughing:

There was a “thing” maybe about 4 or 5 years ago about Etcher sending telemetry back to it’s devs, rather more telemetry than seemed reasonable. I don’t know if that has changed. I guess a small amount like how the app is being used is ok, but any more would seem excessive for a simple image writer. Also why such a large size for a simple app?

If these issues are no longer relevant then I have no issue with it, and if it works for folk then fine.