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).

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    9·
    17 hours ago

    Those are two completely different programs. balencaEtcher is for flashing an ISO to the USB stick. Basically its like installing an operating system on your hard drive, but it installs it on the USB drive. It will make it bootable. If you want a different OS, you have to completely flash the drive and replace whats there.

    Ventoy will also make the USB stick bootable, but it will not flash an operating system onto it. It’s more like a general launcher of ISO files. This means, you only install Ventoy once and then can drag and drop ISO files to a folder. If you boot Ventoy from USB stick, it will show a list of all available ISO files. Choose one and it boots into the distribution, like you would have flashed it with balencaEtcher.

    The advantage of Ventoy is clear: Easy replaceable ISO files and having many to choose from withing a single installation. Filenames of ISOs doesn’t matter and they can be placed in sub directories in the ISO folder I think. Ventoy will just list all available ISOs you can choose and boot into. The disadvantage is, that some distributions or hardware might not work well with Ventoy, but that’s not my experience so far.