by auraham on 10/9/24, 5:06 AM with 91 comments
by nullindividual on 10/9/24, 5:32 AM
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.
by PreInternet01 on 10/9/24, 6:08 AM
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...
by snickerbockers on 10/9/24, 6:29 AM
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.
by o11c on 10/9/24, 5:43 AM
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.
by Aardwolf on 10/9/24, 6:57 AM
by jackjeff on 10/9/24, 7:12 AM
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.
by johnea on 10/9/24, 7:55 PM
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?
by kstrauser on 10/9/24, 5:35 AM
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.
by AStonesThrow on 10/9/24, 5:42 AM
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!
by dataflow on 10/9/24, 5:25 AM
by josephcsible on 10/9/24, 5:31 AM
by thesnide on 10/9/24, 6:16 AM
by DarkmSparks on 10/9/24, 7:55 AM
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.
by lmm on 10/9/24, 6:40 AM
by zild3d on 10/9/24, 7:13 AM
by gjvc on 10/9/24, 7:29 AM
by riiii on 10/9/24, 8:29 AM
by mcv on 10/9/24, 7:23 AM
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.
by zoezoezoezoe on 10/9/24, 7:05 PM
by Jenk on 10/9/24, 9:01 AM
by juangacovas on 10/9/24, 9:36 AM
by exac on 10/9/24, 7:45 AM
by fragmede on 10/9/24, 9:16 AM
by a3w on 10/9/24, 10:13 AM
by WesolyKubeczek on 10/9/24, 1:05 PM
People, mention the numbers please.