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I recently tried to write an Ubuntu .iso to the USB flash drive on OSX using dd. And for some reason that I couldn't easily figure out, write speed was so slow as to be almost unusable. Enter Etcher, and that image got written in a flash. So what ever it maybe, alternatives aren't sometimes that great.

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There are a lot of gotchas with "dd" and its command line syntax is baroque to say the least. On MacOS it's worse because it's easy/natural to write to /dev/disk2 instead of the "raw" /dev/rdisk2 and make everything dog slow.

I understand the appeal of Etcher, but it seems like such overkill to launch Chrome just to write some data to a disk. I wish Windows/MacOS shipped with good tools for this out of the box instead. Disk Utility seems to be getting less useful over time though.

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