Free Software Review: Balena Etcher couldn’t be easier for writing ISO images, but do they really need telemetry?

Debian 11.1 was released a few days ago and that means it’s time to refresh your installer media in case disaster strikes.

It usually doesn’t strike, of course, but the thing about disasters is that they are often unforeseen.

While using GNU/Linux is more reliable, as a strategy, than living in the Gulf Coast of the United States and wondering who could have seen hurricane season coming EVERY SINGLE YEAR, stuff happens.

That’s why it pays to have a relatively current installer.

In GNU/Linux, there are many ways to take an operating system ISO and turn them into a bootable flash drive, but I’ve found Balena Etcher to be the easiest, by far. It’s literally pick an ISO, pick a target press a button, wait a bit, done.

While Debian doesn’t package it, that’s okay, because Balena either has an Apt repo, or an AppImage.

I recommend the AppImage, personally, because how often do you really write ISOs to a thumb drive?

While using dd is, of course, an option that’s simple and there by default on every GNU/Linux distribution, it’s not as welcoming for some users as a graphical utility such as Etcher.

Etcher also allows you to easily clone a flash drive or flash from an ISO you provide to it by pointing it at a URL.

The one thing that I didn’t like about Etcher is that, like most modern software, it sends back “telemetry” (usage statistics and crash and error data) to the company that produced the program, without asking if this is okay, and on by default.

Why does every modern program have to do this?

Other than that, there’s not much to say. It’s a simple program that does the task. While many GNU/Linux distributions have something similar (Fedora Media Writer, Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator, etc.), they aim to be compatible with the ISO files that that particular OS vendor produced, and sometimes have trouble with other ISO files of different operating systems.

One of the reasons that I started using Etcher a few years ago was that I got tired of the incompatibilities with the other tools, and I’ve never had this happen with Etcher.

License: Apache License 2.0

4.5/5 (Minus half a point for the automatic telemetry.)

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