9 ms·

Why the ISO format has to die

95 points by auraham 2y ago

dataflow 2y ago
Isn't the .iso "format" just a byte-by-byte dump of a disc? Just like how a .img is a byte-by-byte dump of... whatever drive? What does it mean that that one of these "formats" to "die"? How do you kill a "format" that's just a straight copy of something?
- DeepYogurt 2y ago
  Nah, there are specific formats for isos. The full spec name is ISO_9660 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660 In a certain sense you're right that in practice dumping the bytes of a disc into a file is what gave people the files, but those discs did have a structure to them. I think what's being said here is that constructing an image in the iso 9660 structure is past its time
  - dataflow 2y ago
    I don't think that's what they're referring to? If that's what they mean, then it's very confusing -- and makes me think if they themselves are confused. It's like saying "we should stop shipping Joliet files" or "we should stop shipping UDF files", which makes no sense. ISO 9660 is a filesystem, not a "file format". Yet they write: > EasyOS ships as a .img file, that is written to a drive. Barry stopped shipping EasyOS as an ISO file from early 2020.
    - DeepYogurt 2y ago
      It's possible I misread it, but fair point on the .img file call out. I suppose I used to refer to .iso files as a file format given that's how I used to interact with them so that terminology read as natural to me.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- jchw 2y ago
  I presume they mean the standard hybrid ISO9660 LiveCD format that Linux distros tend to use. There's a lot of nuance there that I haven't touched in years but needless to say between having multiple boot paths (I think like three--El Torito, BIOS boot sector, and UEFI) and very different media (CDROMs are, well, ROMs, thumb drives are writeable) there can be some complexity if you want to handle some more sophisticated portable OS stuff than just "run the OS installer". I'm sure this is particularly important for persistence, which can sort of be done with "traditional" live media but requires some special effort.
- slashdave 2y ago
  The disc (as in a CD disc) has a format specification that is recognized by the boot firmware. That is what is being copied byte-by-byte, such that the USB drive appears as if it was a CD ROM.
- noirscape 2y ago
  Not quite; there's cases where a .iso will actually miss certain data, since they're just dumps of what the OS recognizes as data; you tend to lose some metadata in the process. It's usually irrelevant (especially for data storage disks, which are most of the medium), until it isn't and then the format stops working. A basic example tends to be CDs with copy protection; ISO can't properly handle the protection (since the format doesn't support it), whilst the .cue/.bin format is a more accurate representation of the disk. You often don't need the disk in .cue/.bin, but in some cases you do want to store the copy protection as well (for example, with PSX emulation or if you very specifically want to digitize the disk itself, rather than the data on it.)
josephcsible 2y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40733040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40733040 for previous discussion on this decision. tl;dr: it's not hard to support hybrid ISOs, and there are still a lot of legitimate reasons to want an ISO.
- Sakos 2y ago
  As somebody who deals with game ISOs all the time (whether old PC games or old console games), I'm left mildly confused by the comments saying ISO is irrelevant. There's tons of media out there where the sane way to distribute them is as an ISO.
nullindividual 2y ago
The author could use a bit of humility. ISO isn’t useful in the author’s use-case. That’s fine, it is their project to do as they will. ISOs may still have uses elsewhere, such as PXE boot or just a near universally mountable read only container. The author’s point to the age of the original ISO standard is irrelevant. Many old technologies are reliable and widely adopted, which in and of itself may make it superior to more modern technologies. Author’s project, author’s will. But that was difficult to read due to their attitude and beyond the author’s use case, didn’t provide a reason for universally retiring ISO.
- Anon_Admirer 2y ago
  While the original ISO standard may still have its use cases, your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior. Your false belief that its long life in a group of other standards - is rather a coincidence that is in correlation to its long life and not a cause of it. Had the USB stick and related softwares for formatting been around sooner .img may have easily won the battle between standards. Unfortunately, CD-ROM was released 1985 and USB flash drives only started really showing up in the early 2000s. We have no way of knowing the counterfactual.
  - quietbritishjim 2y ago
    > your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior. That sentence did not end the way I expected given its start. Survivorship bias does imply that old (surviving) standards are unusually good. That's because standards from the time would have a range of suffering qualities, and the really exceptionally good ones are much more likely to survive in use a very long time.
    - dwattttt 2y ago
      The potential problem though is that the surviving standard may have been the best for a reason that's no longer relevant. There are certainly decisions that have been made over the last 30 years that don't make sense in light of today's storage/power/ubiquity-of-connection that are just incumbent now.
kstrauser 2y ago
Damn straight. One time I wanted to use an ISO with a USB stick and it turned into such a giant pain in the ass that I wrote up all the instructions. I still get a ridiculous amount of traffic on this blog page: https://honeypot.net/2011/10/11/making-dos-usb.html https://honeypot.net/2011/10/11/making-dos-usb.html That was one specific ISO in one specific use case. There’s probably a GUI that does all this automatically now. That one time, though, I would’ve sold a kidney for a dd-able image.
- josephcsible 2y ago
  But you can get what you want without needing to kill off ISOs for people who need that format instead, with a hybrid ISO, like most other Linux distros already do.
- nelblu 2y ago
  Did you try https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html? Ever since I found about it a few years ago ISO has been painless.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
I would say that's fine for Easy to drop their ISO9660 distribution format. The rationale makes good sense. And of course I'm going to fit in the mold of an entrenched, elderly, "old timer", digging in his heels and I'll re-state a fossilized opinion: In general, the ISO9660 format is great for distributing disk images for this reason: it's a mature, international, cross-platform standard. This is not important for a Linux distro that can be set up with ext3/4. But if you distribute something with wide compatibility, you'll still consider making it ISO9660, because a Mac user can roll with it,* and a Linux user will have no problem, nor will a Windows user run into difficulty mounting and reading it. Likewise, if you wish to generate this filesystem image, any of the above systems, and more, will have an app to create a standards-compliant ISO9660 image. In fact, most of the apps will help with staging all your data and assembling it into a nice package, that you'd otherwise want to make something like a build script to go from a bundle of files and data to a finished ext4 image. But for Easy, and any other Linux distro, we've long ago phased out actual optical discs (my elderly fossilized brain recalls Knoppix as a revolutionary "live CD only" distro) so swapping in ext4 images may liberate some devs and support techs. *I don't know actually--do Macs have built-in tools for ISO mounting? They had their own sort of ".dmg" file for "mount as a disk, install this software package", last I checked. And one popular extension is ".img", so Linux distros--stop confusing Mac users!
- odo1242 2y ago
  Double-clicking on an ISO file on macOS mounts it provides the file system is recognized. Read-only though.
  - n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
    I think Windows does the same
- inferiorhuman 2y ago
  In general, the ISO9660 format is great for distributing disk images for this reason: it's a mature, international, cross-platform standard. ISO 9660 is a standard, yes. But what's actually standardized by ISO 9660 is exceptionally limited. Filenames are limited to 8.3 with a quite small character set literally just A-Z, 0-9, _, and a single dot. There are competing long file name standards, Microsoft's uses big endian UTF-16 as is tradition. The RockRidge extensions define support for POSIX semantics, unsure how well supported the POSIX permissions are. MacOS can indeed mount supported ISO 9660 images from the Finder. One of the big advantage of ISO 9660 (and I assume UDF) is that the superblock does not conflict with the HFS superblock so you do both with relative ease. The other big one is that ISO 9660 is quite simple to implement compared to the alternatives.
o11c 2y ago
I think the author is confusing "ISO format" with "read-only install media". The posts make a lot more sense once I make that substitution. There are other errors too (for example, there's nothing stopping you from adding additional partitions in the hybrid case). But I'm pretty sure there are quite a few "partition/filesystem/distro UUID/key/whatever" things that need to be wiped if you boot from an image directly, and this needs to be considered very carefully. Installing an OS twice should NOT be byte-for-byte identical, and if it is that's a security/reliability problem.
- odo1242 2y ago
  Why would it be a security problem if installing an OS twice was byte for byte identical? Don’t distributions (like Fedora Silverblue) already do this?
  - o11c 2y ago
    I'm not sure if they actually share /usr or unconditionally rebuild it on each device (after all, they do need to handle different sets of installed programs). But /etc/ and /var/ in particular need to be system-specific regardless (even though you may be used to thinking of them as being on the same filesystem as /usr/).
    - JoshTriplett 2y ago
      > But /etc/ and /var/ in particular need to be system-specific regardless. System-specific bits like /etc/machine-id get created by the booted system; the installer doesn't need to create them.
    - db48x 2y ago
      You can just leave those entirely empty these days.
  - creatonez 2y ago
    Mainly cryptographic keys like the SSH host key, or stored RNG state. But this can very easily be mitigated using `cloud-init` or similar.
PreInternet01 2y ago
What a strange article. What's called an 'ISO' is, these days, pretty much a thin wrapper for an UDF file system -- you can definitely use it differently as well, but I'm pretty sure nobody has created, say, an ISO9660 plus Joliet plus El Torito image in the past decade or so. And, no, UDF isn't great either, but I wouldn't say it "has to die": it's a pretty convenient distribution format due to being widely supported, as it's really simple to implement. So, this mostly seems to be a rant against live-CD-style Linux distros, since those are hard on maintainers (plus: toxic community multiplier)? On the one hand that might be true, on the other hand, the 'hey, here is how you get an ext4 or whatever filesystem in RAM' tooling around that is so mature and convenient that it's hard to see why, and I can't distill any real arguments from this...
- tux3 2y ago
  Oh I'm sure people still use El Torito today! I remember having to go through that to boot my hobby OS. Admittedly that was some years ago, but you can still find fresh Github issues of lost souls who still use bootable ISOs
  - PreInternet01 2y ago
    Yeah, but I'd call that 'remnants of El Torito'? You basically have tooling to burp out the MBR, boot catalog and UEFI FAT32 shim, all pointing at the native code that can read your actual (very-much-non-ISO9660) file system into RAM and bootstrap it, and you're good to go on USB, ISO, or whatever. The first 3 parts aren't that complicated (literally a few sectors with fixed content, maybe a few pointer fixups), and no reason IMHO to want to kill off ISO. Generating that actual file system is the hard work, but also required for live-USB distros, which circles back to the point being made in the article eluding me...
- Netch 2y ago
  Live CD is mainly replaced with live USB, even if it is called the same nickname.
- nine_k 2y ago
  I think the author speaks about *.iso, referring to the customary extension of ISO9660 image files. I think the author speaks about the particular Linux distro, and with implications for more Linux distros which use live images on USB sticks* for booting and also* as a removable durable storage. I think that the whole rant should be namespaced under "Live distro images" / "Puppy Linux", like "Why ISO image format should be retired from the live images of Puppy Linux", and not in the general case.
thesnide 2y ago
No, the format has not to die. Just some of its usages.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Yes. I think there is likely better options to make bootable USB sticks. And those should be used instead. But for making data CD or DVD. ISO is entirely reasonable. Quite limited case nowadays, but still reasonable.
snickerbockers 2y ago
Whatever dude, I actually do still use CDs but it's not like I care about your distro anyways so go ahead. ISO-9660 is good at the thing it was designed for, which is a read-only media. If it was made for USB sticks it would have indirect-blocks so that files could be trivially expanded. It's not clear what the author thinks it the "death" of ISO-9660 would entail. It's not like it's the subject of constant development or is mandatory for anything other than optical discs. Perhaps he thinks he can influence a sudden and widespread removal of ISO-9660 modules from OSes, FUSE, and archive utilities? Also not sure what's so difficult about it, I thought for the USB-stick case all you do is dd it onto the dev-node and you're good to go? IDK, maybe I'm wrong here, like I said I prefer using CD-R discs on the very rare occasions that I need to install a new linux distro because the alternative is backing up my entire USB stick so I can overwrite it with a new FS and then restore it from backup. And also I always have stacks and stacks of CD-Rs on hand because they're cheap as fuck and I need them for an old video game console which is the subject of my primary hobby.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  >Also not sure what's so difficult about it, I thought for the USB-stick case all you do is dd it onto the dev-node and you're good to go? IDK, maybe I'm wrong here, like I said I prefer using CD-R discs on the very rare occasions that I need to install a new linux distro because the alternative is backing up my entire USB stick so I can overwrite it with a new FS and then restore it from backup. The real alternative is to buy a few $5 USB sticks for the express purpose of installing Linux. Trying to use the same sticks for personal data and OS installs is an unnecessary headache with so many cheap and huge USB keys around. If you want to burn CDs it should be to have more durable copies of some data, as USB keys have been known to lose data when left powered off for many months or years. I think I have never lost data that way but it is hard to tell if I did, on my oldest USB keys.
lmm 2y ago
What a useless page. Maybe put less effort into insults and put the actual explanation front-and-centre rather than burying it in a linked page.
- Netch 2y ago
  Really I would have concur with the author if dealing again and again with a need to fit the media contents into 650MB (if it is intended to be put at real ISO) or to guarantee how combination of 1) realmode bootloader + 2) UEFI bootloader + 3) ISO-only thunk + 4) UDF volume bizarrely interlace in a single byte stream. Bootloaders are dodgy even without such a complication. Freeing oneself from all this may give just a moral sense of deliverance...
  - nullindividual 2y ago
    You're not limited to 650MB provided you use UDF rather than ISO 9660. UDF supports up to 16 EiB. It's still a "real" ISO, but obviously you'd need to stay within DVD size limits to use physical media. Windows has been multi-GB bootable ISOs for over a decade at this point.
    - Netch 2y ago
      > You're not limited to 650MB provided you use UDF rather than ISO 9660. You donʼt take into account case of booting real ISO on an old hardware. If it doesnʼt know DVD, chance of UDF support in BIOS is vague. More so, itʼs possible to barge in to a system without "no-emulation" support so the real boot part will be limited to 2880M due to floppy emulation. Yep, all this is very old. UDF and no-emulation support appeared circa 2000. Bootable USB sticks appeared appoximately the same couple of years. En mass, these systems had been gone circa 2010. (Iʼm even slightly confused I still remember all these barriers, among with CHS addressing, geometry translation, etc.) So each boot media creator has to select what part of this legacy is to be supported... or drop it at all and orient only to a common base for last ~10 years.
      - nullindividual 2y ago
Aardwolf 2y ago
"ISO format" could mean a lot of things, I'm happy this is not about the date format (ISO 8601)
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
  That needs more use! It needs to be an easy to use locale on Linux, and KDE needs to respect the locale which version 6 still doesn't!
  - rswail 2y ago
    There is (used to be?) locale of "en_DK" (or English language for Denmark) that combined English month/day names with ISO8601 dates. Maybe there needs to be an "en_ISO" ("en_UN"?) locale that has: 1. Currency of "$" 2. Numbers with decimal point as "." and group separator as "," and leading zero on (absolute) values between 0 and 1 3. Day names of Monday->Sunday and the equivalent abbreviations 4. Month names of January->December and the equivalent abbreviations 5. Times in 24 hour HH:mm:ss format 6. Dates in ISO8601 yyyy-MM-dd format. 7. Timestamps in "pure" ISO so yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss[.ssss] and with a "Z" or ±HH[:mm] for timezone adjustments.
    - WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
      8. DIN A4 paper size 9. Metric units where possible
exac 2y ago
The installation guide has about 27,000 words. Doesn't sound too easy to me.
jackjeff 2y ago
There are many ways in which ISO files are useful. You have native support in Linux and Windows (you can mount). You usually also have support in virtualization or emulation software like VMWare Parallels, VirtualBox, HyperV… So I get it Etcher for someone who wants to do it on a USB stick is probably as easy if not easier than using cat or dd. I reckon I can probably create the ISO file with Etcher too. But I’ve installed countless distros and never had to download Etcher since I could always point the virtual CD to an ISO file. Bonus point. I don’t need to learn anything about file systems and partitions and block sizes… it just works. I have no idea how these bootable medias work since I never had to make one.
zild3d 2y ago
Was expecting gripes about ISO 8601 format
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mcv 2y ago
> Barry will continue the rest of this page writing in the first-person. Please do. Because this is weird. I have absolutely no stick in this fight. I have always found it a bit weird to use iso images on usb sticks, so I'm with him there. But clicking through to his article about why iso needs to die, where he goes into the practical advantage of the img format, which is that you can have a writeable partition and still use the entire usb and not just the boot image, it's immediately obvious why you might not want that. I mean, having a bootable usb that you can also write to is fantastic if you want to have a portable installation with everything you like that you can take with you anywhere. But if you just want a read-only medium from which to install something to dozens of machines, you don't want anyone writing to it. So I think these are simply two different use cases.
gjvc 2y ago
What's his actual objection though?
DarkmSparks 2y ago
Theres probably a fairly good back story here around how all the encryption garbage basically killed blueray - it won the battle, lost the war. I have a blueray writer, but 50GB isnt really enough to backup files, 25GB definately isnt. The disks are a nightmare to get hold of, and unlike USB sticks, nothing can play the media on them, and the players that theoretically could intentionally do not by design.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
riiii 2y ago
This is just a rant.
Jenk 2y ago
I came in here thinking I was about to witness some slander against the ISO8601 date time format.
fragmede 2y ago
(9660)
juangacovas 2y ago
I don't think that tools like ReaR (Relax and Recover) would agree with retiring ISOs..
a3w 2y ago
*ISO disk image format I was thinking about film.
WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
I thought first it was about ISO8601, but it’s about ISO9660. People, mention the numbers please.
zoezoezoezoe 2y ago
isnt the ISO "format" just a disk image, same for .img, when you run `dd if=file(.iso|.img) of=/dev/sda` you're just copying the bytes from one file to the other, so what really defines the .img or .iso "formats" other than the file extensions?
johnea 2y ago
According to: https://www.iso-accelerator.co.uk/news/post/how-many-iso-standards-are-there https://www.iso-accelerator.co.uk/news/post/how-many-iso-sta... "The ISO Standards Catalogue comprises more than 25 thousand standards" Maybe the author could start out by specifying which ISO standard they're refering to?

95 points by auraham 2y ago

Isn't the .iso "format" just a byte-by-byte dump of a disc? Just like how a .img is a byte-by-byte dump of... whatever drive? What does it mean that that one of these "formats" to "die"? How do you kill a "format" that's just a straight copy of something?

DeepYogurt 2y ago
Nah, there are specific formats for isos. The full spec name is ISO_9660 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660 In a certain sense you're right that in practice dumping the bytes of a disc into a file is what gave people the files, but those discs did have a structure to them. I think what's being said here is that constructing an image in the iso 9660 structure is past its time
- dataflow 2y ago
  I don't think that's what they're referring to? If that's what they mean, then it's very confusing -- and makes me think if they themselves are confused. It's like saying "we should stop shipping Joliet files" or "we should stop shipping UDF files", which makes no sense. ISO 9660 is a filesystem, not a "file format". Yet they write: > EasyOS ships as a .img file, that is written to a drive. Barry stopped shipping EasyOS as an ISO file from early 2020.
  - DeepYogurt 2y ago
    It's possible I misread it, but fair point on the .img file call out. I suppose I used to refer to .iso files as a file format given that's how I used to interact with them so that terminology read as natural to me.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
jchw 2y ago
I presume they mean the standard hybrid ISO9660 LiveCD format that Linux distros tend to use. There's a lot of nuance there that I haven't touched in years but needless to say between having multiple boot paths (I think like three--El Torito, BIOS boot sector, and UEFI) and very different media (CDROMs are, well, ROMs, thumb drives are writeable) there can be some complexity if you want to handle some more sophisticated portable OS stuff than just "run the OS installer". I'm sure this is particularly important for persistence, which can sort of be done with "traditional" live media but requires some special effort.
slashdave 2y ago
The disc (as in a CD disc) has a format specification that is recognized by the boot firmware. That is what is being copied byte-by-byte, such that the USB drive appears as if it was a CD ROM.
noirscape 2y ago
Not quite; there's cases where a .iso will actually miss certain data, since they're just dumps of what the OS recognizes as data; you tend to lose some metadata in the process. It's usually irrelevant (especially for data storage disks, which are most of the medium), until it isn't and then the format stops working. A basic example tends to be CDs with copy protection; ISO can't properly handle the protection (since the format doesn't support it), whilst the .cue/.bin format is a more accurate representation of the disk. You often don't need the disk in .cue/.bin, but in some cases you do want to store the copy protection as well (for example, with PSX emulation or if you very specifically want to digitize the disk itself, rather than the data on it.)

josephcsible 2y ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40733040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40733040 for previous discussion on this decision. tl;dr: it's not hard to support hybrid ISOs, and there are still a lot of legitimate reasons to want an ISO.

Sakos 2y ago
As somebody who deals with game ISOs all the time (whether old PC games or old console games), I'm left mildly confused by the comments saying ISO is irrelevant. There's tons of media out there where the sane way to distribute them is as an ISO.

nullindividual 2y ago

The author could use a bit of humility. ISO isn’t useful in the author’s use-case. That’s fine, it is their project to do as they will. ISOs may still have uses elsewhere, such as PXE boot or just a near universally mountable read only container. The author’s point to the age of the original ISO standard is irrelevant. Many old technologies are reliable and widely adopted, which in and of itself may make it superior to more modern technologies. Author’s project, author’s will. But that was difficult to read due to their attitude and beyond the author’s use case, didn’t provide a reason for universally retiring ISO.

Anon_Admirer 2y ago
While the original ISO standard may still have its use cases, your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior. Your false belief that its long life in a group of other standards - is rather a coincidence that is in correlation to its long life and not a cause of it. Had the USB stick and related softwares for formatting been around sooner .img may have easily won the battle between standards. Unfortunately, CD-ROM was released 1985 and USB flash drives only started really showing up in the early 2000s. We have no way of knowing the counterfactual.
- quietbritishjim 2y ago
  > your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior. That sentence did not end the way I expected given its start. Survivorship bias does imply that old (surviving) standards are unusually good. That's because standards from the time would have a range of suffering qualities, and the really exceptionally good ones are much more likely to survive in use a very long time.
  - dwattttt 2y ago
    The potential problem though is that the surviving standard may have been the best for a reason that's no longer relevant. There are certainly decisions that have been made over the last 30 years that don't make sense in light of today's storage/power/ubiquity-of-connection that are just incumbent now.

kstrauser 2y ago

Damn straight. One time I wanted to use an ISO with a USB stick and it turned into such a giant pain in the ass that I wrote up all the instructions. I still get a ridiculous amount of traffic on this blog page: https://honeypot.net/2011/10/11/making-dos-usb.html https://honeypot.net/2011/10/11/making-dos-usb.html That was one specific ISO in one specific use case. There’s probably a GUI that does all this automatically now. That one time, though, I would’ve sold a kidney for a dd-able image.

josephcsible 2y ago
But you can get what you want without needing to kill off ISOs for people who need that format instead, with a hybrid ISO, like most other Linux distros already do.
nelblu 2y ago
Did you try https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html? Ever since I found about it a few years ago ISO has been painless.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

I would say that's fine for Easy to drop their ISO9660 distribution format. The rationale makes good sense. And of course I'm going to fit in the mold of an entrenched, elderly, "old timer", digging in his heels and I'll re-state a fossilized opinion: In general, the ISO9660 format is great for distributing disk images for this reason: it's a mature, international, cross-platform standard. This is not important for a Linux distro that can be set up with ext3/4. But if you distribute something with wide compatibility, you'll still consider making it ISO9660, because a Mac user can roll with it,* and a Linux user will have no problem, nor will a Windows user run into difficulty mounting and reading it. Likewise, if you wish to generate this filesystem image, any of the above systems, and more, will have an app to create a standards-compliant ISO9660 image. In fact, most of the apps will help with staging all your data and assembling it into a nice package, that you'd otherwise want to make something like a build script to go from a bundle of files and data to a finished ext4 image. But for Easy, and any other Linux distro, we've long ago phased out actual optical discs (my elderly fossilized brain recalls Knoppix as a revolutionary "live CD only" distro) so swapping in ext4 images may liberate some devs and support techs. *I don't know actually--do Macs have built-in tools for ISO mounting? They had their own sort of ".dmg" file for "mount as a disk, install this software package", last I checked. And one popular extension is ".img", so Linux distros--stop confusing Mac users!

odo1242 2y ago
Double-clicking on an ISO file on macOS mounts it provides the file system is recognized. Read-only though.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
  I think Windows does the same
inferiorhuman 2y ago
In general, the ISO9660 format is great for distributing disk images for this reason: it's a mature, international, cross-platform standard. ISO 9660 is a standard, yes. But what's actually standardized by ISO 9660 is exceptionally limited. Filenames are limited to 8.3 with a quite small character set literally just A-Z, 0-9, _, and a single dot. There are competing long file name standards, Microsoft's uses big endian UTF-16 as is tradition. The RockRidge extensions define support for POSIX semantics, unsure how well supported the POSIX permissions are. MacOS can indeed mount supported ISO 9660 images from the Finder. One of the big advantage of ISO 9660 (and I assume UDF) is that the superblock does not conflict with the HFS superblock so you do both with relative ease. The other big one is that ISO 9660 is quite simple to implement compared to the alternatives.

o11c 2y ago

I think the author is confusing "ISO format" with "read-only install media". The posts make a lot more sense once I make that substitution. There are other errors too (for example, there's nothing stopping you from adding additional partitions in the hybrid case). But I'm pretty sure there are quite a few "partition/filesystem/distro UUID/key/whatever" things that need to be wiped if you boot from an image directly, and this needs to be considered very carefully. Installing an OS twice should NOT be byte-for-byte identical, and if it is that's a security/reliability problem.

odo1242 2y ago
Why would it be a security problem if installing an OS twice was byte for byte identical? Don’t distributions (like Fedora Silverblue) already do this?
- o11c 2y ago
  I'm not sure if they actually share /usr or unconditionally rebuild it on each device (after all, they do need to handle different sets of installed programs). But /etc/ and /var/ in particular need to be system-specific regardless (even though you may be used to thinking of them as being on the same filesystem as /usr/).
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    > But /etc/ and /var/ in particular need to be system-specific regardless. System-specific bits like /etc/machine-id get created by the booted system; the installer doesn't need to create them.
  - db48x 2y ago
    You can just leave those entirely empty these days.
- creatonez 2y ago
  Mainly cryptographic keys like the SSH host key, or stored RNG state. But this can very easily be mitigated using `cloud-init` or similar.

PreInternet01 2y ago

What a strange article. What's called an 'ISO' is, these days, pretty much a thin wrapper for an UDF file system -- you can definitely use it differently as well, but I'm pretty sure nobody has created, say, an ISO9660 plus Joliet plus El Torito image in the past decade or so. And, no, UDF isn't great either, but I wouldn't say it "has to die": it's a pretty convenient distribution format due to being widely supported, as it's really simple to implement. So, this mostly seems to be a rant against live-CD-style Linux distros, since those are hard on maintainers (plus: toxic community multiplier)? On the one hand that might be true, on the other hand, the 'hey, here is how you get an ext4 or whatever filesystem in RAM' tooling around that is so mature and convenient that it's hard to see why, and I can't distill any real arguments from this...

tux3 2y ago
Oh I'm sure people still use El Torito today! I remember having to go through that to boot my hobby OS. Admittedly that was some years ago, but you can still find fresh Github issues of lost souls who still use bootable ISOs
- PreInternet01 2y ago
  Yeah, but I'd call that 'remnants of El Torito'? You basically have tooling to burp out the MBR, boot catalog and UEFI FAT32 shim, all pointing at the native code that can read your actual (very-much-non-ISO9660) file system into RAM and bootstrap it, and you're good to go on USB, ISO, or whatever. The first 3 parts aren't that complicated (literally a few sectors with fixed content, maybe a few pointer fixups), and no reason IMHO to want to kill off ISO. Generating that actual file system is the hard work, but also required for live-USB distros, which circles back to the point being made in the article eluding me...
Netch 2y ago
Live CD is mainly replaced with live USB, even if it is called the same nickname.
nine_k 2y ago
I think the author speaks about *.iso, referring to the customary extension of ISO9660 image files. I think the author speaks about the particular Linux distro, and with implications for more Linux distros which use live images on USB sticks* for booting and also* as a removable durable storage. I think that the whole rant should be namespaced under "Live distro images" / "Puppy Linux", like "Why ISO image format should be retired from the live images of Puppy Linux", and not in the general case.

thesnide 2y ago

No, the format has not to die. Just some of its usages.

Ekaros 2y ago
Yes. I think there is likely better options to make bootable USB sticks. And those should be used instead. But for making data CD or DVD. ISO is entirely reasonable. Quite limited case nowadays, but still reasonable.

snickerbockers 2y ago

Whatever dude, I actually do still use CDs but it's not like I care about your distro anyways so go ahead. ISO-9660 is good at the thing it was designed for, which is a read-only media. If it was made for USB sticks it would have indirect-blocks so that files could be trivially expanded. It's not clear what the author thinks it the "death" of ISO-9660 would entail. It's not like it's the subject of constant development or is mandatory for anything other than optical discs. Perhaps he thinks he can influence a sudden and widespread removal of ISO-9660 modules from OSes, FUSE, and archive utilities? Also not sure what's so difficult about it, I thought for the USB-stick case all you do is dd it onto the dev-node and you're good to go? IDK, maybe I'm wrong here, like I said I prefer using CD-R discs on the very rare occasions that I need to install a new linux distro because the alternative is backing up my entire USB stick so I can overwrite it with a new FS and then restore it from backup. And also I always have stacks and stacks of CD-Rs on hand because they're cheap as fuck and I need them for an old video game console which is the subject of my primary hobby.

wakawaka28 2y ago
>Also not sure what's so difficult about it, I thought for the USB-stick case all you do is dd it onto the dev-node and you're good to go? IDK, maybe I'm wrong here, like I said I prefer using CD-R discs on the very rare occasions that I need to install a new linux distro because the alternative is backing up my entire USB stick so I can overwrite it with a new FS and then restore it from backup. The real alternative is to buy a few $5 USB sticks for the express purpose of installing Linux. Trying to use the same sticks for personal data and OS installs is an unnecessary headache with so many cheap and huge USB keys around. If you want to burn CDs it should be to have more durable copies of some data, as USB keys have been known to lose data when left powered off for many months or years. I think I have never lost data that way but it is hard to tell if I did, on my oldest USB keys.

lmm 2y ago

What a useless page. Maybe put less effort into insults and put the actual explanation front-and-centre rather than burying it in a linked page.

Netch 2y ago
Really I would have concur with the author if dealing again and again with a need to fit the media contents into 650MB (if it is intended to be put at real ISO) or to guarantee how combination of 1) realmode bootloader + 2) UEFI bootloader + 3) ISO-only thunk + 4) UDF volume bizarrely interlace in a single byte stream. Bootloaders are dodgy even without such a complication. Freeing oneself from all this may give just a moral sense of deliverance...
- nullindividual 2y ago
  You're not limited to 650MB provided you use UDF rather than ISO 9660. UDF supports up to 16 EiB. It's still a "real" ISO, but obviously you'd need to stay within DVD size limits to use physical media. Windows has been multi-GB bootable ISOs for over a decade at this point.
  - Netch 2y ago
    > You're not limited to 650MB provided you use UDF rather than ISO 9660. You donʼt take into account case of booting real ISO on an old hardware. If it doesnʼt know DVD, chance of UDF support in BIOS is vague. More so, itʼs possible to barge in to a system without "no-emulation" support so the real boot part will be limited to 2880M due to floppy emulation. Yep, all this is very old. UDF and no-emulation support appeared circa 2000. Bootable USB sticks appeared appoximately the same couple of years. En mass, these systems had been gone circa 2010. (Iʼm even slightly confused I still remember all these barriers, among with CHS addressing, geometry translation, etc.) So each boot media creator has to select what part of this legacy is to be supported... or drop it at all and orient only to a common base for last ~10 years.
    - nullindividual 2y ago

Aardwolf 2y ago

"ISO format" could mean a lot of things, I'm happy this is not about the date format (ISO 8601)

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
That needs more use! It needs to be an easy to use locale on Linux, and KDE needs to respect the locale which version 6 still doesn't!
- rswail 2y ago
  There is (used to be?) locale of "en_DK" (or English language for Denmark) that combined English month/day names with ISO8601 dates. Maybe there needs to be an "en_ISO" ("en_UN"?) locale that has: 1. Currency of "$" 2. Numbers with decimal point as "." and group separator as "," and leading zero on (absolute) values between 0 and 1 3. Day names of Monday->Sunday and the equivalent abbreviations 4. Month names of January->December and the equivalent abbreviations 5. Times in 24 hour HH:mm:ss format 6. Dates in ISO8601 yyyy-MM-dd format. 7. Timestamps in "pure" ISO so yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss[.ssss] and with a "Z" or ±HH[:mm] for timezone adjustments.
  - WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
    8. DIN A4 paper size 9. Metric units where possible

exac 2y ago

The installation guide has about 27,000 words. Doesn't sound too easy to me.

jackjeff 2y ago

There are many ways in which ISO files are useful. You have native support in Linux and Windows (you can mount). You usually also have support in virtualization or emulation software like VMWare Parallels, VirtualBox, HyperV… So I get it Etcher for someone who wants to do it on a USB stick is probably as easy if not easier than using cat or dd. I reckon I can probably create the ISO file with Etcher too. But I’ve installed countless distros and never had to download Etcher since I could always point the virtual CD to an ISO file. Bonus point. I don’t need to learn anything about file systems and partitions and block sizes… it just works. I have no idea how these bootable medias work since I never had to make one.

zild3d 2y ago

Was expecting gripes about ISO 8601 format

deleted 2y ago

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mcv 2y ago

> Barry will continue the rest of this page writing in the first-person. Please do. Because this is weird. I have absolutely no stick in this fight. I have always found it a bit weird to use iso images on usb sticks, so I'm with him there. But clicking through to his article about why iso needs to die, where he goes into the practical advantage of the img format, which is that you can have a writeable partition and still use the entire usb and not just the boot image, it's immediately obvious why you might not want that. I mean, having a bootable usb that you can also write to is fantastic if you want to have a portable installation with everything you like that you can take with you anywhere. But if you just want a read-only medium from which to install something to dozens of machines, you don't want anyone writing to it. So I think these are simply two different use cases.

gjvc 2y ago

What's his actual objection though?

DarkmSparks 2y ago

Theres probably a fairly good back story here around how all the encryption garbage basically killed blueray - it won the battle, lost the war. I have a blueray writer, but 50GB isnt really enough to backup files, 25GB definately isnt. The disks are a nightmare to get hold of, and unlike USB sticks, nothing can play the media on them, and the players that theoretically could intentionally do not by design.

deleted 2y ago

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riiii 2y ago

This is just a rant.

Jenk 2y ago

I came in here thinking I was about to witness some slander against the ISO8601 date time format.

fragmede 2y ago

(9660)

juangacovas 2y ago

I don't think that tools like ReaR (Relax and Recover) would agree with retiring ISOs..

a3w 2y ago

*ISO disk image format I was thinking about film.

WesolyKubeczek 2y ago

I thought first it was about ISO8601, but it’s about ISO9660. People, mention the numbers please.

zoezoezoezoe 2y ago

isnt the ISO "format" just a disk image, same for .img, when you run `dd if=file(.iso|.img) of=/dev/sda` you're just copying the bytes from one file to the other, so what really defines the .img or .iso "formats" other than the file extensions?

johnea 2y ago

According to: https://www.iso-accelerator.co.uk/news/post/how-many-iso-standards-are-there https://www.iso-accelerator.co.uk/news/post/how-many-iso-sta... "The ISO Standards Catalogue comprises more than 25 thousand standards" Maybe the author could start out by specifying which ISO standard they're refering to?