this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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ISOs Explained + four programs to make Linux boot media (tinkerbetter.tube)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So, here we'll talk about the following ways to flash ISOs:

Probably fine if you just want to install a single OS once and be done with things. But if you plan on dedicating a flash drive to be your Linux install media for the foreseeable future, just use Ventoy: https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Ventoy has a lot of work to do if they want to earn our trust:

Remove BLOBs from the source tree #2795

This ticket has been open now for 5 months with no engagement from the maintainer.

Your install media and anything that modifies your EFI partition or UEFI firmware settings needs to be the most trusted part of your system. And here is Ventoy, a tool that looks open source and then includes a large number of binary blobs in its repository, with no indication of how they were compiled. This is horrible security practice and for me that's enough for me to never use it.

You can also see a discussion on the subject on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40689629

A much better alternative, if you want a multi-boot USB, is GLIM: https://github.com/thias/glim

It's just a collection of Grub configs, so very simple and easy to audit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Thanks for bringing this up! I started a thread here for us Lemmings to discuss: https://lemmy.one/post/19193506

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I get it ventoy is bad but there's no other software that easy as that, me & my friends use ventoy as daily drive and never got any issues from it.
We already abandoned Rufus & YUMI (like ventoy but a little bit worse, the difference is you had to unpack each ISO into separate folder) looooong time ago because we works as tech guy from reinstall OS (yes...in my country not everyone is tech savvy, even from computer science one) for many clients & since we must have different bootable tools it's not wise to have separate jump drive for each tools

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

@drspod @SatyrSack Ventoy has bad parts yes but many things either are only supported by it or rely too much in it, for example, as a sysadmin I need to have at all time a winlol ISO (even though I hate myself every time I use it) and also as an IT I need to have a MediCat USB at all time, both cannot be done with Glim, so until a better solution sees the light of day, Ventoy should remain my main tool

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

So your approach to security is that you cross your fingers and hope?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

My fav is cat