You can use the standard unix 'dd' tool to copy images to sdcards and usb-drives. You can literally `dd if=whatever.iso of=/dev/rdisk3` (or whatever your disk id is). I have done it dozens of times. It doesn't give you a progress indicator, but I don't need to do this often anyway.
The pro version does make sense thought, I just can't imagine a long running manufacturing process where the SDcards are arriving faster than I can write to them.
Unless you are a very rare person indeed, you presumably liked that your linux computer's OS had an installer to handle all the busywork for you, because installing the OS is not a project that interests you. Personally I am a big fan of compilers that prevent me from having to mess around in machine code. All of computing is abstracting and making things easier and I do not really get why Etcher in particular always attracts these 'i dont get it' comments when this exact microsm is the basis of our entire profession.
Because if you are creating some bootable media, it's not difficult to assume you are installing something on a raspberry pi, creating some bootable disk to mess around with your or someone else computer or phone, working on an embedded device, etc, etc. Basically I assume you know what a terminal is.
Maybe I am just too old, but I can't imagine downloading and installing a 430MB (just checked) GUI tool that runs one command.
Your example (gamers) makes sense though, and this should be a lesson for me.
It’s not even about can you keep up with the rate manually it’s about is it cost effective, $1000 is what 50 hours at $20 per hour? That thing pays for itself in any setting.
A few minutes later...
"The dd utility copies the standard input to the standard output. Input data is read and written in 512-byte blocks. If input reads are short, input from multiple reads are aggregated to form the output block. When finished, dd displays the number of complete and partial input and output blocks and truncated input records to the standard error output."
Excuse me, what?
Takes three clicks, doesn't require me to remember how to use dd, and prevents any stupid mistakes.
also what I like about etcher in particular is that it always seems to correctly identify usb drives even if some other tool has messed up the partitioning. I'm not the kind of person who can remember all the cli commands.
After you start dd, open another terminal and enter either:
`sudo kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$)`
Or, if you're on BSD or OS X:
`sudo kill -INFO $(pgrep ^dd$)`
https://askubuntu.com/a/215521
but etcher seems to be way faster than dd for me
bs=1M will help you.