Tails no longer recommending balenaEtcher

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

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...

159

Privacy Guides @lemmy.one Forumite @lemm.ee 4h ago

Tails has replaced balenaEtcher with Rufus in the Windows installation instructions to address privacy concerns

tails.net /news/rufus/index.en.html

62 0

Privacy @lemmy.dbzer0.com Otter @lemmy.ca 2d ago

Tails no longer recommending balenaEtcher

tails.net /news/rufus/index.en.html

58 7

159 comments

Thats a shame, it was one of the few disk imagers that "just worked"
i still had issues using 150MB electron based bloated and heavy software instead of rufus, not that it worked for me anyway
- I only tried to use it once, and same. 150MB of a Web app to copy an ISO? I think I was using a Macbook to flash it and decided to use ventoy instead, with my PC.
  
  I understand that it needed a GUI, but 150 megs?? When :
  
  ~ ❯ ll `which dd` -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 63K Sep 29 16:36 /usr/bin/dd* ~ ❯
Unrelated to balenaEtcher but I haven't been able to flash ISO files from Windows 11, either by using Rufus, Etcher, Fedora Media Writer, or even the WSL. I need to borrow a computer running a FLOSS operating system or to install OpenBSD first, and then from OpenBSD to download and burn an ISO file.
- That sounds like an issue with your computer rather than W11. I just used Etcher on my W11 desktop to flash Mint XFCE yesterday with no issues.
Here's a wildcard people might not know about: Raspberry Pi Imager

I use it because it's faster than Etcher and it also has a bunch of quick links to download popular images (mainly for RPI and other arm-based SBCs) in one click which is handy if you use those regularly.
Wow, I was not aware of that. I really liked balena. Thankfully, I haven't been using it since installing Mint.
Just use dd. It's not that hard. You pass it 2 arguments: if= the file you want to flash, and of= the destination. If you're feeling fancy, pass in some status=progress. And don't forget to prepend it with sudo. That's it.
- I just tried this the other day and was unable to boot from the USB. Any chance you could shed some light on what I might have screwed up?
  
  The command was:
  
  dd if=fedora.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress
  
  The USB stick was not mounted and the fedora image was verified. The command completed successfully but I couldn't boot from it. When I used fedora writer to burn the same image to the same USB stick it booted no problem.
  
  Edit: spelling & capitalization
  
  Don't use Fedora myself, but it may not be a hybrid ISO that becomes bootable when written... so I looked and you are missing a flag
  
  dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=8M status=progress oflag=direct
  
  From https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-and-using-a-live-installation-image/
  
  Did you make sure that the of is correct? lsblk to make sure.
  
  If your sure it wrote to the right drive i would make sure that you have a good download. Did you run your checksums?
  
  I think fedora works with secureboot but you might want to disable it just to see if that is the issue. I believe you can reenable it after install.
  
  Make sure to go into the bios and boot from external drive/usb.
  
  Out of 15 years of using dd i have never had a problem.
Not using Ventoy in 2025?
- I guess I could install Ventoy on the raspberry Pi's SD card, but I prefer it to be bare, since the idea is to keep it simple.
- Ventoy uses several blobs without any instructions of compiling them yourself?
Friendship ended with Balena

Now Rufus is my new best friend
Rufus is great! I worked with the maintainer to fix a bug in hardware they didn't have and it was a very pleasant experience.
Balenaetcher has, for me at least, failed to write to USBs for the last 3 years or so that I've tried to use it - meanwhile random iso writers from flatpak have been more reliable for me. Very obnoxious that so many iso related sites recommend it. Rufus kicks tons of ass, if for whatever reason you're still on windows.

Also on most distros I've tried, the disk utility has some sort of right click or context menu that gets you a 'restore disk image' button that works great as well.

Edit= I used Popsicle USB writer from flatpak on steam deck with no issue today! Made by system76 (makers of popOS) and found on flatpak. It is absolutely no frills, but works well enough to write an SD card image for a raspberry pi! 🙂
- Flatpack? You are using Linux and you need "iso writers"? Is your dd broken, son?
  
  😂 I also read this as Ron's voice!
  
  Nah as much as i love doing stuff via terminal, I am extra paranoid specifically about writing to the wrong device and losing data; I prefer as many confirmations as possible that I'm writing to the correct drive, and graphical installers tend to give me just a few more reassurances. A few examples would be stuff like
  
  a graphical representation of partitions (the general layout of a drive tends to offer an easy 'fingerprint' in my mind; like the pattern of partitions help me confirm I'm looking at, say, a Debian install USB compared to a single-partition general purpose storage disk)
  
  icons for different types of devices, like an SD card, USB, or hard disk icon
  
  confirmation dialogues summarizing what device is targeted, and what all will be performed
  
  I'm also the kind of person who stares at a written email worrying about every last nuance of my phrasing, so 🤷‍♂️😂 definitely a me problem, I think!
  
  This sounded like a techy Ron Swanson.
Why use a fancy GUI tool when good old dd does the trick
- for Windows
- cp command works well too
- Because of the risk of accidentally wiping the main drive if you're just copy pasting stuff
  
  If that happens to you, that's both a great reminder that mindlessly copy-pasting commands from the internet is a terrible idea, and a chance to practice your restore-from-backup routine! I see no downsides.
- pv for life.
  
  dd status=progress can also tell you how far along the operation is.
  
  cat is the tool of distinguished gentlemen
Is no one aware of Fedora Media Writer? It's FOSS and the most trustworthy ISO burning software in existence. It's only issue is that its named as if it is written only for producing Fedora bootable media. It works for everything.
- Opensuse has one too. And dd exists for the brave or the foolish
  
  The article at the end mentions they suggest dd as alternative for MacOS (due to Unix user space). It seems the balena -> rufus decision is about the easiest-onramp Mac+Win-portable option, for those uncomfortable dropping to low-level device-writing CLI tools in their current system.
  
  Side-note: Last time I was on a friend's Windows I installed dd simply enough both as mingw-w64 (native compiled) and under Cygwin. So for Windows users who are comfortable using dd it only requires a minor step. When I once used WSL devices were accessible too, but that was WSL1 (containerized), whereas WSL2 (virtualized) probably makes device-mapping complex(?) enough to not be worth it there.
- I dunno... I just use dd.
  
  cat works perfectly fine too 👌
- Meh i find it slow.
- Or gnome disks, which also adds an "open with 'write to drive'" option to isos and images
Linux mint factory USB creator just right click and make bootable.
If you need a FOSS, cross platform GUI for bootable USB sticks, Raspberry Pi Imager is a really good solution.
It is mainly used to flash SD cards for RPIs, but also you can burn any ISO on any support with it.
- I used to use the fedora media writer but the RPi imager software is so easy I switched
♬ Hello dd my old friend
I’ve come sudo with you again ♬
- Hello cat or cp or pv... Or anything else that works with files
  
  Huh this is news to me. Wonder why dd has been the defacto standard in guides everywhere for the past 15-20+ years
- .. and the sign said the bytes of the distro are written to the SD card …. if they’re un-tar’d ..
I knew that UI had something to hide!

Never trust an overly fancy UI...
- nah, plenty of good stuff with good ui.
  
  balena had effects and stuff but a pretty tasteless gui tbh, and ads promoting other shit...
Not used it since I discovered this nonsense. Shows how seriously they take security. https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3410
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.
- So tor is compromised?
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.
- I've used Sardu on Windows for making multi-iso bootable USB sticks a long time ago in the past, but I'd admittedly never looked at their ToS or Privacy Policy. My use case was slapping some live boot antivirus scanners, data recovery tools, and one or two lightweight liveboot-Linux ISOs on one USB as a portable toolkit.
  
  When I'm making anything else from Windows, I've always stuck with Rufus. Had never heard of BalenaEtcher before now.
  
  I"m horrible with names of programs and mess with a lot of junk comps switching out OS's and just tinkering around so I'm always using crazy utility programs. BalenaEtcher is used in a lot of tutorials or guides for installations, I think recently both Elementary OS and even Ubuntu had instructions pointing towards BalenaEtcher.
  
  I never thought it was a great program, it was finicky to use and errors out quickly multiple times. Looking back I saw the signs, weird new program being promoted above other "well established" burn programs, ads, and now scrolling down their webpage it's just a bunch of promotional subscription bullshit. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit looking at the "balenacloud" and "balenasense", like if they're collecting your data through etcher then all of that shit is probably compromised. Another fucking google wannabe corp.
have they tried also tracking for errors, cause it fucks up every second image unlike rufus
- Truth. Etcher is garbage. Rufus is king.
Sudo dd if=tails.iso of=/dev/sdb
- bash: Sudo: command not found
  
  Lol, nice one
  
  Ah, a doas user, I see!
  
  Sudontplease :P
- In my early days of Linux, I royally fucked up a USB thumb drive (back when they were expensive) using dd and as a result do not trust myself with it.
  
  I would use Hannah Montana Linux if it was the only GUI option to burn a USB ISO.
  
  Weird. I can't even tell you how many times I've used that command. But it's probably been several thousand. And I've never screwed up a flash drive that way.
  
  There has been once or twice where I've pulled the flash drive out too quickly after it finished writing and it actually hadn't finished writing and had to redo it, but other than that, I've not actually screwed up any drives beyond repair or anything.
- for Windows?
  
  Rufus.
  
  And who cares if there's spyware on windows, you're already using windows so there is, it's windows. At that point you may as well just use etcher, but I'd use Rufus anyway because let's be real it's just better. The only reason not to use Rufus is because it's windows exclusive, but if you're using windows that probably doesn't bother you, so...
  
  Install wsl lol.
  
  Install WSL
  
  Oh, sorry. I didn't realize you were on Windows. That's a Linux command. I haven't used Windows very much since about 2018, so I don't even consider Windows anymore unless it's brought up.
what is a good one to use, is there something like rufus on linux
- https://circle.gnome.org? Never tried their ISO software, I just use dd.
- I just use Gnome Disks for convenience over dd.
- 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.
  
  i've never needed to set a single flag with dd. i just do if=the_iso of=the_disk. what flags?
  
  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.
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 used it because that's what the instructions on the Linux Mint website for creating a bootable USB stick from Windows say to do.
  
  I have no clue what "electron wrapper", "dd", or "rufus" are. I'm trying to learn more, but can't learn it all in one day.
  
  https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/burn.html#in-windows-mac-os-or-other-linux-distributions
  
  weird that the installation guide is hosted on a separate website that hasn't been updated in eight years. that's irresponsible of them. anyway rufus is a better version of etcher that you can download for windows.
- 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
  
  On Windows, Rufus is just as easy to use tho. And on Linux, there is Gnome Disks.
  
  use rufus.
- Rufus seems to be just for Windows and dd does not have a gui
  
  that's correct. on windows, rufus is a better tool, and on linux or mac it's just a built-in command with a manual packed in.
  
  also, ubuntu ships with startup image creator, and gnome disks ships as a flatpak, if those are more your speed.
- I've typically used Etcher when I have to write an ISO on Windows
  
  use rufus.
Yet another reason for people to run a default prompt (deny until prompt answer) firewall.
- A what?
  
  Good question. I will attempt to clarify:
  
  OP is saying that individual should run firewalls on their machines, that block port activity by default, and only allow traffic upon an approved request by the administrator account.
  
  An interactive firewall.
  
  One that blocks programs from accessing the internet and prompts the first time they try until you click a button that says allow or you choose the alternative which is deny. A program like this you'd have no reason to give it internet access, it's something whose operations should be entirely local.
Happy user of Ventoy here
- Good luck with the binary blob!
  
  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.
  
  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
- Completely aside from the blob issue mentioned, the Tails team has recommended against using a multiboot utility like Ventoy to install Tails. Ventoy works fine for basically any other operating system (again, aside from the blob issue), just not Tails, which is what this post is about.
- 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
- My luck with Ventoy has been very poor. The isos will work a few times and then something breaks and I need to re download all my isos and format and try again.
  
  That's..... Interesting. I've been using Ventoy professionally for like... 2-3 years now and I've not once had an issue with daily use. Unironically like 2500-3000 uses without issue.
  
  This has been my experience as well. Some people love it, but I'm not gonna rely on it for critical backup or recovery tools (also, there's that whole binary blob thing, besides).
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.
Thank you for pointing it out.
Honestly, if you're using Windows, then you most likely already sent any and all of your secrets to Microsoft anyway. Including that you installed Tails.
What options are there for flashing to SD cards? Something that works on Mac too would be nice. A gui is preferred.
- Plug your usb drive in and run lsblk to figure out which letter to use instead of x in /dev/sdx
  
  sudo dd if=image.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=1M status=progress
  
  EDIT: I totally didn't read your request. This is not gui or Mac based, but it still might help someone.
  
  The comment said "SD Card" so it would be /dev/mmcblk*
  
  Thanks for trying.
  
  I'm not against terminal, but I'd just have to look up commands every time that I rarely use.
  
  I'm pretty sure mac, being based off freebsd, would include dd
  
  Mac should have dd, ~~I'd assume lsblk as well~~ not lsblk though. There's fdisk though
Generally Ventoy is better than both. Choose a dedicated flash storage, flash Ventoy to it, then click and drag as many ISO's as can fit on your drive and you can boot from any one of them at any time.

Much better than Etcher or Rufus, IMO.
- Who tf is downvoting? Ventoy is the best
  
  I'm guessing the people aware of Ventoy's undocumented binary blob.
  
  https://lemmy.one/post/19193506
The MX Linux live USB maker should work well on Debian based distros.
I used it less than a week ago for a Mint install, worked fine.
- If you actually read the post, you would have known, it does work, but there are some privacy concerns with it:
  
  “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.”
  
  I seriously DGAF who knows which Mint edition I installed or the brand of flash drive I used.
balenaEtcher never worked for me. No image that I flashed has been usable to boot. The RPi imager has been working flawlessly
Doesn't the official guide recommend using GNOME Disk Utility anyway?
Glad I saw this. I downloaded the tool on recommendation from a forum post when I was reviving my homelab. I’ll nuke it for sure.
Ahh too bad because balenaEtcher just werks for me.
- If you actually read the post, you would have known, it does work, but there are some privacy concerns with it:
  
  “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.”
  
  I did read the post before constructing my comment and that's why I feel sad for seeing privacy concerns popping up at balena, because that's just my fav.
dd
...and that's how I met your ~~mother~~ fork
I've been avoiding it ever since the Balena moniker change.
I mean for privacy things it makes sense to avoid leaking anything. But I fail to understand where the danger is to have anonymous data that says a user installed "Ubuntu-24.04-wappity-whatever.iso" to "KINGSTON DATA TRAVELER 32GB" at some point.
- If anything that seems like worthwhile analytics for the dev team to have access to.
  
  Most software lets you opt out of sending anonymous analytics data though.
  
  They could just ask. "Please allow us to know what you flash and on what device so we can improve the software" yes, no, tell me more, show me the data
- It is a trap for people not knowing and government may use it as excuse to activate executive

159 comments