Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
I admit it – I’m a distro hopper.
If I’d see a Linux variant worth investigating, it was time to fire up UNetbootin (shown below) and create a bootable flash drive.
And so it went for probably a decade or so and a couple hundred Linux variants.
Then things started getting goofy – UNetbootin stopped working when Jammy was released and it doesn’t appear anybody’s making a great effort to correct the problems.
Hate to say it, but UNetbootin was a little long in the tooth when it came to recognition of recordable drives. Had no problems with USB thumb drives but I never got a flash card to work unless it was attached to a USB adapter.
And while it graciously offered to download several different Linux varieties, it rarely worked within the past year or so.
So, in essence, UNetbootin is a UNogo (sorry, had to stick that in there).
What do us distro-hoppers do then?
You could try dd (disk dump) or Ventoy, but they are a bit more complicated than most casual users would probably prefer.
How about something a bit more modern and not so confusing - balenaEtcher aka Etcher? You can find it at balena.io/etcher (it’s original name was Etcher – the title I’ll use from here on).
While you could go through the hassle of adding the Debian repository to your system and then installing Etcher from there, I opted to install the appimage directly from the website.
And what’s an appimage you ask? It can be used as a standalone program on your computer or used as a portable program on an external drive. You get a twofer.
Once downloaded, you right click on the icon, go to Properties and then Permissions. Click on “Allow Executing File as a Program”.
From here it should be fairly evident what you need to do, but there are 2 options for making a bootable drive along with one for cloning your current HDD/SSD: * Flash from file. In this case you download the ISO image of your choosing and then point Etcher to the location. * Flash from URL. Here you provide the web address for the download and Etcher will fetch it for you.
Given those options, the first one should be your choice. Some download pages have more entries than an IHOP menu and who knows what you might get.
If you’re looking for recommendations like UNetbootin offers, no such luck here. No downloads, either. You do the research and procurement, Etcher does the rest.
As for the Clone drive option, that’s for those who already are satisfied with their current operating system and want to clone it for backup or transfer to another computer. It’s incredibly simple to use but that’s a discussion for another day.
Now you move on to Select target. Pick your thumb drive or flash card. As a helper it’ll list the ones available. Unlike UNetbootin, Etcher has no qualms about SD cards and the like.
In fact, if you have more than one USB or flash drive mounted, you might want to remove all but the one you plan to use. Don’t want to mistake one for the other.
And, finally, Flash.
Without much fanfare beyond that, you should have a bootable drive within a couple minutes.
Now for the inevitable question – is it quicker than UNetbootin?
No, sorry. Still takes just as long, it’s just prettier doing it.
Nothing is perfect and Etcher is no different. One pitfall I’ve found is that it stinks at housekeeping.
If you attempt to load a new OS on your flash drive, UNetbootin will overwrite anything on that drive, even previous operating systems. It may use bits and pieces of what it needs to work, but anything else is history.
Etcher doesn’t bother. Old ISO images will clog up your USB drive until you clear them out or reformat.
On the plus side, it will tell you that the destination drive doesn’t have enough space before starting the process, but it won’t help cleaning up.
So it creates a multi-boot drive then, right?
Wrong. Your computer, just like the ones I’ve tried it on, will only recognize the last image loaded. All the others are ghosts. They are still there, but at boot your computer will see just the last one.
But, in the long run, this is the easiest option now available to make a bootable iso image, so us distro-hoppers had better get used to it.