friendica.eskimo.com

Balenca vs Ventoy?

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).

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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
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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.

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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.

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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.
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What is faster about always flashing the required ISO instead of selecting it more quickly in the boot loader?
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Eh nothing really, but if you don't have a Ventoy set up and you just need an image burned it's more convenient to just use balena or something else.
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Ah ok. Haven't used anything other than ventoy for ages.
I may have used drivedroid on the side because you can boot from Android (requires root) and you always have the smartphone with you anyway. But I haven't used it for ages either.
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@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.
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I would also love that! The truth of this matter would be much preferred over a bunch of cast aspersions.
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Endeavour 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.
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