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Comment by p1mrx | Hacker News Reader

> and needing external tools like Rufus

Ubuntu and Linux Mint are now recommending balenaEtcher, which is easier to use than Rufus.

While so, you have to download a program from somewhere. If I gave this to my mother she would just totally click the wrong link, infect her windows machine and give up.

For the tech, sure but for common people not so.

Why cannot Ubuntu just offer a download media creation tool like Windows does. Surely it's not that hard to couple dd with a batch gui.

Fedora does, fwiw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Media_Writer

looks like it’s not just for fedora either. though that is still a little more complicated than an all in one ubuntu/mint/whatever installer. maybe someone should fork it and/or add that to this.

Fedora media writer is fantastic. You're right, it can either automatically download a fedora iso, or you can just feed it any image. Its so simple and handy for me, to the point a recent foray back to Debian was cut short because there was no included equivalent and the alternatives were just a hassle.

Although, the `cat liveimage.iso > /dev/sdX` tip mentioned in this thread is very handy and is probably enough for me. Anything I can do without a distro specific tool is a win.

I wouldn't expect a casual user to install Windows, drivers and supporting software on their own, either.

A fresh install of Windows on consumer laptops requires users to locate drivers and supporting software from the OEM's website and not infect themselves with malicious software in the process.

I use it but I'm very careful about it since it just puts hard drives and usb sticks into the same category. Most of the time that's fine but if you have hard drives smaller than the usb stick in your system it'll autoselect the hard drive instead and if you're not carefull you're fucking your live system.

And having to go through this insanity each time is even worse

https://blog.balena.io/did-etcher-break-my-usb-sd-card/

Is this advice insane or am I missing something

> to fix your busted drive, just nuke the boot sector and send it

> bash

> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xxx bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc

I often do that (with a larger prefix, like 1MB) to reset flash drives with weird partitioning.

I noticed no difference in ease of use

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