I’m curious what the difference is between Balenca etcher and Ventoy for writing isos to a live USB for distro hopping purposes. I see both recommended in fourms. Is there any advantage to using one over the other? Are they both equally safe/secure?
I’m also curious about trying out new distros. I’ve been using LMDE for about a year now and it’s been fine, but I want to expand my knowledge and see whether LMDE is my favorite distro or not. I’m not the most well versed in Linux and don’t have any prior programming experience so a beginner/mid level distro is what I’m looking for. I want something I can test out without connecting to WiFi (so not arch).
I liked etcher before balena bought it. The cli was small and easy to use. After the buyout it got super bloated.
USBImager does the same thing.
Balena Etcher is a writer that does one ISO at a time. Other similar options are Fedora Writer, Rufus, etc.
Ventoy is one that can do multiple ISOs and is generally easy to manage.
However, be aware that Ventoy has a lot of unknown code involved. There’s binary blobs that the maintainer refuses to open source, so there’s a big question over whether it’s hiding some malware or is using unpatched packages. Nobody knows except the maintainer, and it’s just his word saying it’s safe. You could use it to test out ISOs, but I wouldn’t personally use it to actually install a system.
Also, the Ventoy fanbois are pretty insufferable, and they tend to brigade anyone that speaks ill of Ventoy or its dev.
If you want something similar that’s open source, Glim works and could be a good option; YUMI has been around for a while, but I dunno if it’s still a good project or not.
Edit: typo
Can you point to some discussion of the ventoy blobs? I had never heard and can’t find anything that says it’s not GPL3.
I want to use Glim too, because the binary Blobs in Ventoy are bugging me a lot. But Glim is a bit limited still: README
My experience has been that the safest filesystem to use is FAT32 (surprisingly!), though it will mean that ISO images greater than 4GB won’t be supported. Other filesystems supported by GRUB2 also work, such as ext3/ext4, NTFS and exFAT, but the boot of the distributions must also support it, which isn’t the case for many with NTFS (Ubuntu does, Fedora doesn’t) and exFAT (Ubuntu doesn’t, Fedora does). So FAT32 stays the safe bet.
Yep. It’s probably fine for most people, but it’s still a trade-off between transparency and utility. Ventoy is superior functionality, but those blobs bug me, too, and the fact that the dev is so openly hostile towards transparency is concerning.
Those are two completely different programs. balencaEtcher is for flashing an ISO to the USB stick. Basically its like installing an operating system on your hard drive, but it installs it on the USB drive. It will make it bootable. If you want a different OS, you have to completely flash the drive and replace whats there.
Ventoy will also make the USB stick bootable, but it will not flash an operating system onto it. It’s more like a general launcher of ISO files. This means, you only install Ventoy once and then can drag and drop ISO files to a folder. If you boot Ventoy from USB stick, it will show a list of all available ISO files. Choose one and it boots into the distribution, like you would have flashed it with balencaEtcher.
The advantage of Ventoy is clear: Easy replaceable ISO files and having many to choose from withing a single installation. Filenames of ISOs doesn’t matter and they can be placed in sub directories in the ISO folder I think. Ventoy will just list all available ISOs you can choose and boot into. The disadvantage is, that some distributions or hardware might not work well with Ventoy, but that’s not my experience so far.
Belena is simpler, it’s just writing an image to a drive.
Ventoy is complicated and changes the booted image to make it work. That sometimes breaks things.
