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).

  •  Telorand   ( @Telorand@reddthat.com ) 
    21•6 hours ago

    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

    •  thingsiplay   ( @thingsiplay@beehaw.org ) 
      4•6 hours ago

      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.

      •  Telorand   ( @Telorand@reddthat.com ) 
        4•5 hours ago

        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.

    •  JustMarkov   ( @JustMarkov@lemmy.ml ) English
      1•4 minutes ago

      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.