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).

  • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    19 hours ago

    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.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
      12·
      15 hours ago

      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.

      • ouch@lemmy.world
        5·
        10 hours ago

        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.

        • IcyToes@sh.itjust.works
          5·
          8 hours ago

          You ain’t wrong. The level of arrogance stinks. Especially when the author put effort into documenting the sources etc.

          There do appear to be a lot of these know-it-all-but-contribute-little types around.

          Maybe a few are missing, but simply asking, and I’m sure they’ll provide. If someone wants a better build system, they could volunteer to do it themselves.

      • AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works
        31·
        16 hours ago

        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.

        • Telorand@reddthat.com
          3·
          14 hours ago

          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.