USB Imager
Version: 1.0.8 Web: https://gitlab.com/ bztsrc/usbimager
Etcher, SUSE Imagewriter or Gnome Disks are the three most widely used utilities (not counting
dd) for writing ISO images on to USB thumb drives. You’ll need to do this when trying out another Linux distribution on a bare metal setup instead of a VM. However, we’ve got a handy little application that has some cool advantages over existing tools.
USB Imager provides a minimal GUI for doing a single job: flashing target USB devices, and it’s a crossplatform tool that provides the same experience under Linux, macOS, Windows and Raspberry Pi. However, while most other competitors support only ISO images,
USB Imager has a longer list of supported input files. It can transfer any file you throw at it, but of course we were curious to test the program with such formats as . img, .bin and .raw, and they were all handled correctly.
Despite USB Imager’s small interface window the program is more versatile than just a writer. It can work the other way round to create images out of storage devices. A more thorough test revealed that USB Imager does a better job than its rivals in terms of synchronised writes. In other words it shows that a process is 100 per cent complete when it really is, meaning you can safely remove the USB drive and be confident that nothing has been left behind. We also liked USB Imager’s super small binary size. For instance, Balena Etcher may be a good program, but its footprint is over 130MB. This is just 300KB in size and offers more features.
You can build USB Imager with a single make
command, no configuration needed. The default GUI may alienate some; feel free to compile the tool with a custom command to make it match your GTK theme:
$ USE_LIBUI=yes make
This will naturally require slightly more dependencies. Also, don’t forget to add yourself to the ‘disk’ group to use the program without altering privileges.