from Hacker News

Usbimager – A non-electron based alternative to Balena Etcher

by charsi on 10/18/21, 11:25 AM with 99 comments

• by naoru on 10/18/21, 3:32 PM

  Etcher 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.

• by factorialboy on 10/18/21, 2:51 PM

  I'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

• by jason0597 on 10/18/21, 2:43 PM

  I 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/

• by charsi on 10/18/21, 5:07 PM

  I should have used the much better url for this - 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-man...

• by colinfinck on 10/18/21, 2:41 PM

  I'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?

• by korse on 10/18/21, 3:56 PM

  Got to give a shout out to my boy, dd.

• by izackp on 10/18/21, 3:46 PM

  There is also 'dd' and winDD for windows.

• by automato on 10/19/21, 4:58 PM

  just tried usbimager. got an error: "Permission denied" after i explicitly gave it permission to access the drive.

• by 1MachineElf on 10/18/21, 2:28 PM

  This 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.

• by marcodiego on 10/18/21, 2:01 PM

  Writing 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.

• by AnonHP on 10/18/21, 1:51 PM

  Mod/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

• by BiteCode_dev on 10/18/21, 2:52 PM

  I'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?

• by baal80spam on 10/18/21, 2:14 PM

  Praise 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.

• by craftoman on 10/18/21, 2:37 PM

  What'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.

• by NikolaeVarius on 10/18/21, 1:55 PM

  I've always found it so weird that a piece of trash like Etcher could become so popular

• by SavantIdiot on 10/18/21, 4:59 PM

  As 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.