How to create bootable USB thumb drive with iso file

[Sheemon Lists]

Dear Liam;

You make for a tempting conversationalist ;-)

The issues you raise are new to me in the specifics but hardly surprising.
In years past I served in a major computer manufacturer.  Questions about
efficiency were poohpoohed.  All the while, an illegal activity was
conducted on a regular schedule.  At one time it evolved around the
strcmp(3) library call.  An undocumented instruction was utilized where a
string comparison could perform (if I recall) about 5-6 times faster.  The
illegality was in revealing this to one software vendor but not to
another.  I was tasked with measuring how fast could fast be, and what the
impact on RDBMS engines would be (they do a lot of comparisons ;-).  What I
was doing, on company time, was establishing the value to these vendors.
What the market will bear, was the popular term.  I resigned.
Nowdays, performance and efficiency are really orphans. My telephone has
6GB of RAM, 256GB storage and 8 CPUs running at billions of
instructions/second.  Oh, I have a cheap "Chinese" telephone (which one is
not?)
I really turned my career towards kernel work, or standalone code. In the
past 15 years I did not even own a computer.  My life was going along no
better, no worse.
I am dipping my toes in that cold, fast flowing river, just to discover it
is really a lukwarm, barely moving swamp.  The scenery is fascinating,
tempting and amusing.  Much more middle age, full of bureaucracy,
complicated, but still;  no new concept was created past 1972.
Challenge me on that, and a much longer letter will come your way :-))

Live long and prosper my friend.  Your name sounds familiar.

Simon

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 18:37 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 30 Apr 2020 at 22:36, Sheemon Lists <sheemon.lists at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > i wonder what/how this application is different from dd(1).
>
> And get this. My installed copy of Balena Etcher for macOS is 265MB.
>
> Two hundred and sixty-five megabytes, for an app that writes an ISO
> file to a USB key, which can indeed be done in a single command:
>
> dd if=linux.iso of=/dev/sdb
>
> Of course it has fancy autodetection for finding a USB key attached to
> your system, a nice UI for picking it, picking the ISO, progress bars,
> updated-version detection and self-update, etc.
>
> But to be honest, if it wasn't in Javascript, you could do most of
> that in 265 _lines of code_. But because Javasacript is now the #1
> programming language, and it was designed to run embedded in web pages
> and manipulate their contents, Javascript apps for local execution
> often have to embed an entire web browser to render their UI. And a
> JIT compiler to improve its rather poor performance. And fonts,
> graphics, etc. to make it look nice.
>
> So if you have multiple Javascript apps -- for instance, I use the
> Franz multiprotocol messenger, and Rocket.chat, and occasionally the
> Atom editor, and Skype -- then you have multiple embedded web
> browsers, all with their own vulnerabilities and exploits. Just 4 apps
> like Etcher consume _a gigabyte_ of disk space. Four apps.
>
> And people used to reject Mono and .NET apps because they were so
> inefficient! People complained that Ubuntu contained Tomboy and
> F-Spot.
>
> They are on the order of _a thousand times_ smaller than
> Javascript/Electron apps.
>
> Just for fun, go on, guess what language GNOME Shell in GNOME 3 is
> mainly implemented in. Go on. Guess.
>
> > The last time I installed Ubuntu was circa version 12.
> > One would think this class of "issues" was resolved by now.
>
> You would indeed.
>
> > The dedication to mindless blank filling is admirable, but quite
> unnecessary.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > I did manage to create a bootable USB SD device and installed Kubuntu
> 20.04.
> > I had difficulty with the default (Gnome based) version; it confused me
> with the 'custom' partitioning dialog.
>
> Odd. That should not be necessary.
>
> My recommendation is Xubuntu. These days, IMHO, XFCE hits the sweet
> spot. It has all the functionality and more of GNOME 3 and KDE, or
> even than MATE, but takes less disk space, less memory, is more stable
> with fewer bugs and fewer releases. It's smaller, faster, safer and
> just as rich, while being more functional and more customisable than
> LXQt. Really, what more can one ask?
>
> MATE adds one function I like: you can lock things in place on its
> panels. This is useful for newbie users. Otherwise, XFCE matches it in
> every way, and handles vertical panels _far_ better, which is very
> useful on widescreens.
>
> --
> Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
> Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
> Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
> UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
>
> --
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