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Comment by NikolaeVarius | Hacker News Reader

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

Even using mostly the terminal for tools like dd and file management, I've used Etcher sometimes. Also I've recommended it for a few people less experienced than me.

The reason: it is very user friendly, the interface is beautiful and, even for more experienced people, it brings a little more confidence than using dd directly.

I wouldn't call it a piece of thrash.

I don't care about interface "beauty", but GUIs definitely add a lot of comfort for things like drive operations and Git commits: I hate writing an arcane one-off command line command, and not truly being sure the outcome until it's already running.

That being said, I'd much rather not install a miniature Chrome browser just to provide the UI for a command line tool, so I'm glad to see non-Electron as a selling point.

When 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...

Unfortunately, Etcher is a perfect metaphor for the state of "modern" technology in general. Inefficient to it's core.

it burns my microsd cards way faster than dd, what do you mean "inefficient to its core"?

Do 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.

I highly doubt that it's faster than a dd with proper blocksize. With inefficient I mean that it's an Electron application.

I 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.

There are a lot of gotchas with "dd" and its command line syntax is baroque to say the least. On MacOS it's worse because it's easy/natural to write to /dev/disk2 instead of the "raw" /dev/rdisk2 and make everything dog slow.

I understand the appeal of Etcher, but it seems like such overkill to launch Chrome just to write some data to a disk. I wish Windows/MacOS shipped with good tools for this out of the box instead. Disk Utility seems to be getting less useful over time though.

I think it's pretty popular for cloning raspberry pi SD cards. It has a feature where you can stick a bunch of USB SD card peripherals and program multiple cards at the same time. Honestly most people don't care too much about the image size or performance I think it's more that when you use it you are pretty certain that you are writing the correct target drive. I've done it may times with dd command and every time I am nervous about overwriting my os drive.

from a technical writing perspective, it lets you write one set of direction that works for every single user every single time. This is great if a project is supporting via volunteers. And if you know enough about imaging to do it without etcher, you can just do it.

You know, I've been on both sides of this. I used to feel that way, like why not dd? And lately I've come to really value tools that don't force me to think at all.

I'm FULLY aware that this premise has enabled the vast majority of garbage software that exists, but I think perhaps it's good to remember that we can have software that is both "very very mindlessly good" and "absolutely also respects users," Syncthing comes to mind here.

It's good looking, simple, reliable, and most people aren't too concerned with an extra 100 MB download if they're already downloaded a few GB of disk image. It makes sense that it would be popular in tutorials, and spread out from there.

Maybe because it works and is very easy to use

Exactly, I could create a bootable USB device using the command line, but I don’t do it very often, so I quickly forget how.

Well, I'm pretty techy, but it was easy to use.

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