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Comment by encom | Hacker News Reader

When your flashing app starts getting bigger than the operating systems it's writing, you should start asking yourself some questions.

  ~$ du -h $(which dd)
  76K     /usr/bin/dd

Etcher truly is the clowniest Electron app of them all.

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Better and similar size:

    $ du -h $(which pv)
    116K     /usr/bin/pv

pv has a progress bar and nicer syntax. Next time you need to write an image, try:

    sudo pv -Yo /dev/blah /path/to/your/image.img

The -Y makes it sync after each write so that the progress bar represents actual progress instead of just how fast you can copy to kernel write buffers.

My life improved measurably after I contributed that '-o' flag to pv and it then made its way into all my systems through regular OS updates :)

Nice pro-tip! Thanks stranger.

Long live dd! Except every time I use it I am terrified I'll blow out the brains of the wrong device :/

Another example clown app: the MacOS downloads of TuxGuitar, a Java app, used to just ship as a zip with a big jar in it. Now it ships an entire Java Runtime environment specific to your processor architecture. It's 480MB. Derp.

> the MacOS downloads of TuxGuitar, a Java app, used to just ship as a zip with a big jar in it. Now it ships an entire Java Runtime environment specific to your processor architecture. It's 480MB.

MacOS used to include Java out of the box, and then they stopped doing that. How else should an app reasonably behave to keep supporting new versions of the system?

Requires: Java 22 [link]

And now you've made it the user's problem. You can do that, but they won't thank you for it.

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