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).
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
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.
Can you point to some discussion of the ventoy blobs? I had never heard about that and can’t find anything that says it’s not GPL3.
Maybe start here, but there’s lots of discussion on the post.
Should I be worried? I was distro hopping for a bit and put together a Ventoy drive to make that easier, and I used it to boot the install iso for the distro I ultimately decided on for my gaming laptop. It seemed highly recommended and I didn’t know about the Ventoy bros at that point.
Probably not. I’ve used it as well (before I knew about Glim) to preview distros, but I am not using it to do installs, since I can’t be certain what’s in it.
Ugh, those GitHub comments are horrible. If I was the author, I would just walk away from the project. People have no shame in making demands for free work.
This thread made me look at this issue. Realistically it’s not a big issue, the VAST majority of the binary blobs are accounted for and have a script or a readme file that shows where they’re downloaded from.
That being said I will take a serious look at alternatives.
Yeah, that’s pretty much where I landed after reading through it.
Also, the Ventoy fanbois are pretty insufferable, and they tend to brigade anyone that speaks ill of Ventoy or its dev.
I more often see a different picture, where any mention of Ventoy leads to unreasonable agression and screams about how storing multiple ISOs on the same disk is useless.
I have quite literally never seen that. The majority of the time, somebody brings up Ventoy, somebody mentions the opaque blobs or some other legitimate criticism, and a bunch of fanbois pile onto that person for having their own opinions or concerns.
Ventoy works well, but the lack of transparency concerns me and people like me.
I have a different experience. There was one thread which linked to a github issue. The issue said some blobs don’t have source code. Ironically when I went on to check, the blobs mentioned in the issue had source code, but there were other blobs which seemed to miss the source or build instructions.
I would love to have an independent audit to put this issue at rest. All that happens is more and more noise and no resolution. I am not a programmer so can’t really help here.
I would also love that! The truth of this matter would be much preferred over a bunch of cast aspersions.
Cool! I might give that a try instead of the Ventoy i use regularly. Thanks for the info !
Love ventoy. That one usb becomes a Swiss army chainsaw.
But as said elsewhere it hides proprietary blobs among other things.
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.
Ah, yes, Ventoy, my favorite “open source” program. https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795
The files it uses are mostly just the tools and shims which can be copied over from a working distribution.
The maintainer is just lazy and he doesn’t let people improve it either because he wants it to be coded in a certain way: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795#issuecomment-2326831525
It is not a malicious project, yet the xz-utils backdoor should make us be concerned, and we should only use a fork that pulls in the binaries from trusted sources.
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.
You’re comparing apples to oranges here, but of course Ventoy is a more versatile tool, after one time preparation you’re just copying ISOs like files, you can use multiple ISOs at once etc, also do you really need a clunky electron app to burn images on Linux
ventoy is nice in that I can just dump ISOs to a single USB and take it around, but balena is one of many boot media tools that’s useful if you need a single ISO for a system - fast.
What is faster about always flashing the required ISO instead of selecting it more quickly in the boot loader?
@IceFoxX @merthyr1831 I just keep a handful of color coded thumb drives. I know the red one for example is Ubuntu-Mate 24.04, the black one Win10, the yellow, Gparted Live disk, the Green Boot-Repair, etc.
I use Ventoy regularly but im too lazy to setup Grub2 on a USB and load up isos.
Not sure who these Ventoy fanbois or bros are.
Yup Ventoy does hide binary blobs and has some dodgy devs and code. Use at own risk.
Also I dont have any sensitive stuff. So mostly Ventoy is used to install playground server isos and stuff. Not much use for it otherwise.
You can also write an iso to a USB stick with:
cp path/to/awesome.iso /dev/disk/by-id/usb-My_flash_driveEndeavour IS is arch with KDE and a few basic apps. Pretty sure you dont need WiFi to test it. For any issues you can just use the arch wiki. I really enjoyed it as first distro as the wiki is so helpful. I moved to Mint tho (not DE) and have loved not having to use the terminal for anything.
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.
