Tails - Replacing balenaEtcher with Rufus as installer for Windows
tails.net

I am shocked by this - the quote in below is very concerning:

“However, in 2024, the situation changed: balenaEtcher started sharing the file name of the image and the model of the USB stick with the Balena company and possibly with third parties.”

Can’t see myself using this software anymore…

  • ☂️-
    17•2 months ago

    what is a good one to use, is there something like rufus on linux

      • ☂️-
        1•2 months ago

        is there something special needed for windows isos, it doesnt seem to want to boot for me

    • yeehaw
      3•2 months ago

      Can always use dd but I always go stupid when I need to set boot flags and all that crap, which is so much easier with etcher. I think I’ve done dd with gparted in the past.

      • ☂️-
        2•2 months ago

        does gparted set the correct flags too, can it also do windows

        i just want a dumb ui i can dumbly drag the iso file to and it takes care of everything for me.

      • lime!English
        2•2 months ago

        i’ve never needed to set a single flag with dd. i just do if=the_iso of=the_disk. what flags?

        • yeehaw
          2•2 months ago

          Don’t you need to mark usb disks as bootable if you want to boot from them to install Linux or whatever

          • lime!English
            3•2 months ago

            that’s not something i’ve ever had to do, i’ve only done that for hard drives.

          • @[email protected]
            1•2 months ago

            i think it depends on the image you get - for archlinux you can simply cat (or dd) the file onto a usb stick and it works perfectly fine, bootable. but i think i have seen an image at some point where it didn’t work, but i don’t recall what it was.

            • yeehaw
              1•2 months ago

              It won’t depend. I think it’s because back in the day we never had an easy way to force boot a device, if a device wasn’t flagged as bootable it wouldn’t boot