About a year ago, I downloaded an ISO of Linux Mint 20.3, verified the checksum and successfully created a bootable USB using Etcher. When I booted from it, I saw the “integrity check” option and thought, why not?
Surprisingly, it had detected an error. I created another bootable USB with a different flash drive and checked again, no error. Faulty flash drive I guess.
What would’ve happened if I had proceeded with the errored USB? Would it have failed to install or would it have successfully installed and given me a corrupted installation? I don’t know, it’s a question that worries me, and since that day I’ve wanted integrity checks on every Linux ISO since verifying the checksum no longer seemed bulletproof.
So why is this option not included with every bootable ISO nowadays? It seems like a harmless and useful option to have in the GRUB menu for the bootable media. Fedora has it, OpenSUSE has it I think, but nothing else I tried had it. Ubuntu 20.04 had it but in Ubuntu 22.04 they removed it, and by extension it’s gone in Linux Mint, too.
