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Usbimager – A non-electron based alternative to Balena Etcher
- izackp 5y agoThere is also 'dd' and winDD for windows.
- naoru 5y agoEtcher was a nice simple application, but now it's an attention grabbing adware monster. I don't need any promotions when I'm burning my SD cards, thank you very much. I'm surprised that so many people here chose to defend it.
- voakbasda 5y agoI was shocked to hear they turned such an easily replaceable tool into a bloated pile of adware. Such behavior is hostile to developers in a way that calls into question all of their other choices, including those they will make in the future. Source code is a crown jewel for an IoT device, and they have opened a door for potential exploitation and exfiltration right where the sausage gets made. This tool has absolutely no business talking to the network for any reason, but now it downloads and displayed ads from potential third party sources (that the user cannot fully control and probably does want to not trust). What an unimaginably bad security decision. And they expect us to trust them with an IoT infrastructure? As a direct consequence of this strategy, I have started to actively steer my IoT customers away from their offering, because I feel this move demonstrated that their stack should not be trusted.
- atatatat 5y agoDevelopers don't click things to make bootable drives.
- craftoman 5y agoWhat's wrong with Electron? Etcher is a tool with 5 minutes maximum running time, it's not Slack where you have to run on background for hours. Also size is irrelevant these days, you can download a 150 mb file in 2 seconds.
- tentacleuno 5y ago> Also size is irrelevant these days, you can download a 150 mb file in 2 seconds. Where I live the average internet speed is around 30Mbps (even going as low as 15/10 in some cases) so that definitely isn't true, sadly.
- trillic 5y agoMaybe you and I have near gigabit connections, but not everybody has constant access to high-speed non-metered internet
- KMnO4 5y ago> Also size is irrelevant these days, you can download a 150 mb file in 2 seconds. Definitely not the case for the majority of the world. Sure, it’s probably true for most HN readers, but many countries still rely on 3G infrastructure — or worse: satellite. I remember spending over a week downloading Ubuntu 18, which also consumed ~10% of my monthly data cap for that single ISO. And before you make any assumptions, this was rural Ontario, Canada in 2019.
- WA9ACE 5y agoYes, it's incredibly frustrating to hear people assume everyone has high speed home connections. I operate entirely off cellular. 150 MB is not chump change and it certainly does not download in 2 seconds. If it's not a problem that affects the developer shipping the software it's not a problem that gets noticed or cared about, unless it ends up on a PM's radar or sentry.
- fouric 5y agoEvery time you hear someone making false assumptions about internet connections, don't forget to mention Dan Luu's excellent page on this! https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
- WA9ACE 5y agoThank you for linking me to this this, it's a wonderful write up that I had not seen before!
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoI've always found it so weird that a piece of trash like Etcher could become so popular
- kiryin 5y agoWhen I first heard of it I thought it was some kind of a joke on the current state of desktop software, and a rather tasteless one at that. Then it was recommended to me where I was studying...
- lpcvoid 5y agoUnfortunately, Etcher is a perfect metaphor for the state of "modern" technology in general. Inefficient to it's core.
- automato 5y agoit burns my microsd cards way faster than dd, what do you mean "inefficient to its core"?
- lpcvoid 5y agoI highly doubt that it's faster than a dd with proper blocksize. With inefficient I mean that it's an Electron application.
- howLongHowLong 5y agoDo you choose your block size when you use dd? For me, on multiple OSes and oldish hardware, $ dd if=/path/to/iso of=/path/to/disk bs=1M seems noticably faster than etcher. I suspect thats not even the optimal choice Edit:noticed this is sort of a repeat answer, leaving it so the people saying its slow can copy/paste and try it out.
- rixrax 5y agoI 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.
- AnonHP 5y agoMod/OP: The link leads to a person’s profile page on GitLab. Please update it to this link for the README on Usbimager: https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager/-/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager/-/blob/master/README.md
- tecleandor 5y agohttps://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager should be ok too Also, for the "site": https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager
- dang 5y agoOk, we've changed to that from https://gitlab.com/bztsrc https://gitlab.com/bztsrc. Thanks to both of you.
- marcodiego 5y agoWriting directly to sectors of a block device is the kind of low level task I'd not think could be done well by web derived technologies like electron. I'm glad I was wrong. Electron apps may eat too much RAM, have their performance impact, but for an app that is seldom used and won't be running continuously in the background, that is really not a problem. Considering that hardware constantly evolves, even if such evolution has been slowing down, the benefits on portability for these apps are a price I'm very willing to pay for.
- folkrav 5y agoYep, this is exactly the type of application I don't care if it eats my RAM for a couple of minutes if it does its job well. In my experience it does. I just use `dd` if I have access to it but otherwise etcher does the job for me, for example on Windows machines.
- handrous 5y agoAgreed. Little GUI utilities that I'm likely to only use for a few minutes every now and then can be Electron. Doesn't bother me a bit. If it's something I run frequently for short spans (a calculator, a search-to-launch tool, that kind of thing) or leave open for long stretches of time (so, messengers, most kinds of document or text editors editors, anything that lives in the system tray) then it's outside that narrow sweet spot in which Electron doesn't suck.
- fouric 5y agoThe problem is that Electron applications don't just eat lots of RAM and CPU - they also have significantly larger installer sizes - usually in the hundreds of megabytes, it seems. (Balena's seems to be 140 MB, compared with 12MB-1MB for alternatives[1]) For small, one-off utilities, you might not care about CPU or memory usage - but you might want to minimize the installer/binary size because you're using it for such a short period of time or a specific task. For instance, the Windirstat installer is 630 Kb, which is appropriate, because I use it fairly rarely. Want to guess how large the smallest Electron application would be? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28905752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28905752
- baal80spam 5y agoPraise the lord. I had to use Ether recently to write a Linux image to a pendrive (it didn't work when I used Rufus, they specifically stated on the site to use Etcher) and I couldn't believe what a piece of trash software that is. To think I had to install an over a 100 MB application to do such a trivial task, it was mind-boggling.
- infinitezest 5y agoSo is it a piece of trash because of the size of the software or because it doesn't work well? I'll grant that the size seems excessive but I tend to use it because I hardly ever need to use it and it makes a task that I don't want to have to care about really really easy. That's sad if there's a smaller piece of software that makes the task just as easy and error proof I'm certainly happy to switch to that.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoI had to write a 100MiB "rescue" Linux image to a USB drive, and was offered two methods to do it: 150MiB "Etcher" and 1.1MiB Rufus. Yes, the flasher was larger than the image I was trying to flash. The word monstrosity comes to mind. Rufus literally has more features. You may think the interface of Etcher is "better", but is it really 150x times better ?
- 1MachineElf 5y agoThis usbimager tool looks great. Yes, Balena Etcher is popular, and it works well on different operating systems, but it's EXE installer is over 140 MB. That's far, far more than is needed for this functionality. Compare Balena Etcher on Windows to Win32DiskImager, which needs only 12 MB. UNetbootin accomplishes this with just 5 MB. Rufus gets it done with just over 1 MB. That's all you really need on Windows to accomplish this task. On macOS, no 3rd party software is even required at all. It has a graphical Disk Utility program that makes this easy to do. Major Linux distros also have built-in GUI programs for this. For cross platform GUI, this Usbimager tool appears to fulfill the need too. The bloat and potential attack surface of Balena Etcher makes me unreasonably sad. I would like to see less of it.
- Uehreka 5y agoBalena Etcher has been popular for a while and works really well, I’ve never seen it screw up. I’d honestly prize that reliability over download size, I have terabytes of space. If usbimager takes off and becomes the default, cool, but I’ll take boring reliable Etcher over some trendy new thing any day.
- Isthatablackgsd 5y agoDid anyone have a good experience with Balena Etcher? I don’t have a good runs with it, the boot process always failed to detect the files in the USB drive that was formatted by Etcher. BIOS couldn’t detect the partition or anything in that USB. I tried with various Linux distro and Windows ISOs, it just failed to load or not detectable in the booting. Even it couldn’t load a simple Gparted partition. The only one I found consistent working is Rufus, it always works for me. Gparted, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, various distro and it works great with Windows ISO (even there is a Windows Media Creator). Rufus is only one so far in my experience that handles everything perfectly. Rufus is basically VLC of USB bootable utility, whereas Balena Etcher is Windows Media Player without all of the codecs (the original window version, not the MPC-HC/BE).
- cordite 5y agoI've had a bad experience! After writing a usb boot disk, it automatically switched to my external drive media instead of selecting nothing at all. I had to do another and after plugging the same drive back in, I wrote to the external drive media instead. I lost several personal things that day and paid for some recovery software. The safe thing to do here was to not to automatically select some high-volume media.
- colinfinck 5y agoI've been using Win32DiskImager since the first Raspberry Pi. Never found a reason to change. Usbimager looks nice in comparison to the bloated Balena Etcher, but otherwise very similar to the Win32DiskImager I'm already using. Or is there something I am missing?
- m-p-3 5y agoPi Imager has some nice Raspbian-specific advanced features hidden behind a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+X), which can be useful if you plan on deploying a headless system. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-imager-update-to-v1-6/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-imager-update-...
- CraftThatBlock 5y agoI was looking for this last week and couldn't find it on the site. Thanks!
- jason0597 5y agoI highly recommend Rufus for Windows users. I've used it many times in the past without any issues. Very lightweight and very reliable https://rufus.ie/en/ https://rufus.ie/en/
- mattowen_uk 5y agoIf you are feeling brave it can be done in Windows without any extra software... 1. Use DISKPART to wipe the USB storage, and create a new active partition as FAT32 2. Use Windows Explorer to open the ISO and copy all the files to the new blank USB Storage. Works for most 'live' DVD/USB based distros supplied as ISOs, but not-so-much for .img files with multiple partitions (like Raspbian)
- fuzzfactor 5y agoWhen you format the FAT32 partition using Windows 10, or execute BOOTSECT.EXE /nt60 on the partition, it writes an NT6 bootsector to the partition which seeks & loads BOOTMGR. When you format the FAT32 partition using DOS, or execute SYS.COM on the partition, that would write a DOS bootsector to the partition which seeks & loads IO.SYS. When you SYSLINUX the target FAT32 partition using either Windows or Linux, that writes a Syslinux bootsector to the partition (also writes ldlinux.sys & ldlinux.c32 files) which seeks & loads ldlinux.sys (and ldlinux.c32). Which then searches for the syslinux folder and a syslinux.cfg file inside. Also ldlinux.c32 and any .C32 files in the syslinux folder need to be the same version that you SYSLINUX'ed the partition bootsector with. With the full fileset of the live Linux distribution copied to the bootable Syslinux'ed FAT32 USB drive, change the name of the isolinux folder to syslinux and inside your new syslinux folder, change the name of isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg. A good live distribution will then boot from a Syslinux'ed USB FAT32 partition using a syslinux folder, instead of from a DVD using an isolinux folder.
- craftoman 5y agoI had boot problems with Rufus when burning a custom distro.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- factorialboy 5y agoI've used USBImager for several months now. It is exactly the kind of app I love: Minimal, does one thing well, no-bloat. https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager
- kitsunesoba 5y agoThanks for linking this, I love the multi-front-end approach. With the simplicity of the program and it’s UI it doesn’t really benefit from one-front-end-everywhere the way something more complex would.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoI'm the first person to complain about bloated electron apps, but this is a task that I do so rarely I really don't mind it's electron. This is, btw, not really an alternative to etcher, more like an alternative to rufus or unetbootin. Indeed, the reason they made etcher was because they had too many help requests from hobbyists trying to flash their raspi sd cards. So they made a candy UI, and the requests dropped. The candy UI is the main goal of etcher, if you remove that, then why not use the already very fine existing solutions?
- nlarion 5y ago> I'm the first person to complain about bloated electron apps
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoCan we report this account? It has been opened 4 years ago, with 2 comments, including this one.
- JasonFruit 5y agoWhy? It's not a great comment, but hardly offensive.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoBecause it looks like a bot, not a human being. Hey, @nlarion, if you are not a bot, say so.
- korse 5y agoGot to give a shout out to my boy, dd.
- atatatat 5y ago...which all of these other projects use =]
- SavantIdiot 5y agoAs always: please show me an alternative to Electron that works out of the box on Linux/Win10/MacOS with zero edits to your JavaScript. I would be delighted if there was an alternative. I ask every time an Electron hate discussion pops up. Still nothing anywhere near as good for Node Server + Browser Framework.
- sudosysgen 5y agoYou understand that such a solution would have exactly the same issues as Electron, right?
- charsi 5y agoIf all the assets are downloaded from your website then make it a PWA. Example - ms outlook (web version). If you want to put the assets on the user's computer run it as a webserver on localhost and launch it in the user's already installed browser. Example - syncthing. Browser weirdness is not a thing anymore. So packing your own build with the application is super weird.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoI thought of distributing a node server, but it is going to non-sophisticated users who expect a EXE or DMG or tar.gz and a binary. Also, it interfaces with a wide range of system hardware, USB, VISA, serial ports, GPIB, etc. I tried to build a docker image, but that also was too complex for the end user, and it had some serious hardware issues with some USB devices.
- lpcvoid 5y agoSo you have requirements to interface to low level peripherals, and you need to do this in the worst language ever invented, which is at the same time one of the highest level languages? It boggles my mind.
- ale42 5y agoWhy should it be JavaScript? If we generalize to other languages, Qt does it very well in C++. You might like Qt or not (I'm not a big fan, but heavily prefer it over Electron), but it definitely does the job using much less resources than Electron (but still much bigger than pure platform-dependent native code...)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- charsi 5y agoI should have used the much better url for this - https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/usbimager/ https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/usbimager/ I like rufus on windows but it feels weird to fire up my gaming rig to write a linux usb. Usbimager is cross platform. Also discovered this user's manual for usbimager - https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager/raw/master/usbimager-manual.pdf https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager/raw/master/usbimager-man...
- automato 5y agojust tried usbimager. got an error: "Permission denied" after i explicitly gave it permission to access the drive.