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Comment by odyslam | Hacker News Reader

I have always used Etcher[0] and I love it.

I tried this once but was annoyed at it being an Electron app, and sure enough it has analytics that spy on your usage by default including "information about the type of SD cards and USB drives": https://www.balena.io/docs/learn/more/collected-data/#balena...

Then flash it on an OS that's not connected to the Internet? That's what I do anyway. For some that's a pain, but over time I learned to have an OS that's airgapped for privacy reasons.

Obviously it’s not the end of the world for technical people who are in the habit of looking inside all new applications’ settings and reading their privacy policies, but it means I could never recommend this app to anyone in good conscience knowing they will probably skip all of that and get spied on.

Unfortunately, etcher has a long history of privacy violations which I find completely unacceptable (especially for an open source project!) https://forums.balena.io/t/serious-privacy-concerns-with-etc...

As in, even when I turned off 'report usage statistics', it kept making outbound network connections. That was it for me... trust lost; uninstalled immediately.

I love that something that basically clones what "dd" can do is ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FOUR MEGABYTES. And people just accept that as normal. dd is 76k

Imagine if the binary is 128MB how big the source code repo must be.

I'll take a GUI that helps me triple-check I'm not dd-ing my root volume

I get great mileage out of Etcher but I need Rufus to make a USB boot to Windows install.

I prefer Etcher over Rufus because there's very little to configure. It's easy to get the settings wrong in Rufus and it can make an ISO unbootable or unusable if you don't know what you're doing.

Nice, how does the reliability compare to unetbootin ?

Etcher is easy to use but why on earth did they decide to make it an electron app?

Portability, RUFUS is windows only, most other tools require a lot more work to port. this one appears to be installable/usable on Win/Mac/Linux

Personally I'm a fan of ventoy[0] though it doesn't appear to be installable on mac, but if you set it up on linux/windows you can just drop any iso you want onto it from any system and it'll work like a charm.

[0] https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

I can't imagine electron is more compete than a wine wrapper around a native windows app. Qt or similar gui shouldn't be too much work for what appears to be a single window app.

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