I knew that UI had something to hide!
Never trust an overly fancy UI...
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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nah, plenty of good stuff with good ui.
balena had effects and stuff but a pretty tasteless gui tbh, and ads promoting other shit...
That's interesting, apparently it was mentioned on github but nothing seems to have changed in the end
https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3784
Haven't used that software in a long time but maybe there's an opt-out somewhere during runtime? Although I don't see why a user needs to be required to opt out of nonsense like this when just writing firmware to a USB disk.
Only ever touched balenaEtcher when some project or distro recommended it. Overall prefer Rufus for this sort of thing when working on Windows.
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I remember a while back, years before this surfaced, there was a thread on /g/ with a group photo of Balena's employees and a caption like "why does it take so many people to develop an electron wrapper around dd". Obviously it was low effort engagement bait (balena does much more than etcher), but the comments were full of people calling the company a glowie honeypot and the like. Moral of the story: Trust the schizos, they sense spyware form lightyears away.
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Not used it since I discovered this nonsense. Shows how seriously they take security. https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3410
i still don't understand why anyone would use etcher. it's an electron wrapper over dd. it's 80MB where rufus is 1.5. when it appeared there were already other programs that did its job better.
I like clicking buttons that have a text on them saying what they do instead of trying to memorize a gajillion terminal commands and flags where I have to enter more commands and flags to see what they do.
plus it's some some sanity checks like not showing you your system drives. Or warning you when the drive you are about to nuke is suspiciously large and maybe not the usb drive you actually want to use.
This is basically the main feature. Stopping you from fatfingering the wrong drive
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have they tried also tracking for errors, cause it fucks up every second image unlike rufus
Truth. Etcher is garbage. Rufus is king.
Yet another reason for people to run a default prompt (deny until prompt answer) firewall.
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I tried belenaEtcher once on my Mac... And it seemed to me more like a spyware than an actual software, I was a bit confused and never used it again.
Happy user of Ventoy here
Good luck with the binary blob!
For some more context:
https://lemmy.one/post/19193506
💀💀 seems like dd commands and gnome's MultiWriter might be the only ways to flash stuff on linux
Fedora Writer is another one (also works on Windows and maybe Mac), and there's also GLIM for multiboot, similar to Ventoy.
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I thought the binary blob thing was explained?
Basically UEFI booting requires shims and those need to be signed so the Ventoy author is re-using the ones from Fedora and OpenSUSE. This can be verified by comparing hashes, which the author of that comment shows how to do.
This whole thing seems to come down to people freaking the F out because they don't understand how the software works and the Author of the software is currently PO'd off at the community and stopped answering questions.
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Last I heard it was also suspect: Ventoy source code contains some unknown BLOBs, still no word on the issue from the dev after months
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