The I/O size is a reason why it’s better to use cp than dd to copy an ISO to a USB stick. cp automatically selects an I/O size which should yield good performance, while dd’s default is extremely small and it’s necessary to specify a sane value manually (e.g. bs=1M).
With “everything” being a file on Linux, dd isn’t really special for simply cloning a disk. The habit of using dd is still quite strong for me.
For me, I only got to 5 Gbps or so on my NVMe using dd and fine tuning bs=. In second place there was steam with ~3 Gbps. The same thing with my 1 Gbps USB Stick. Even though the time I saved by more speed is more than made up by the time it took me to fine tune.
Interesting. Is this serious advice and if so, what’s the new canonical command to burn an ISO?
Recently, I learned that booting from a dd’d image is actually a major hack. I don’t get it together on my own, but has something to do with no actual boot entry and partition table being created. Because of this, it’s better to use an actual media creation tool such as Rufus or balena etcher.
Found the superuser thread: https://superuser.com/a/1527373 Someone had linked it on lemmy
Thanks for the tip. Not that I plan to read up on the matter and make the next cold installation even more anxiety-inducing that it already is. Sometimes Linux would really benefit if there were One Correct Way to do things, I find. Especially something so critical as this.
There is. Just use a media creation tool, like Rufus. dd’ing onto a drive is a hack.
But how trustworthy is Rufus? This is a pretty critical operation, after all.
Assuming you have a brand-new Windows laptop in front of you, how do you go about getting Linux on it? Genuinely interested to know. Last time I had to do this, I went via Windows Powershell or whatever it’s called, and used
dd. Seemed like the option involving the least untrusted parties.Personally I think that the distros should be taking charge of this themselves, and providing the .exe installer as well as the ISO.
Why would you count Rufus and balena etcher not trustworthy? Sounds like you’re to deep in the paranoia, which I completely understand, but gets just impractical “Man yelling at cloud” depending on how deep you are.
dd is just another program too, why trust dd? Linux is just another Program too, why trust Linux? And so on. You can audit every (OSS) Program if you want in theory, but let’s be real, no one does that because time is better spent elsewhere.
Wow. I’ve been using dd for years and I’d consider myself on the more experienced end of the Linux user base. I’ll use cp from now on. Great link.
Good to hear, I’ve only been in the Linux World for a few years myself, but I was very surprised too. Through I don’t think that using cp is any different in terms of creating boot records and a partition table.
Nowadays I just use Ventoy
Same for me. Ventoy is pretty amazing and keeps most of my isos on it. Sadly, sometimes it’s not capable of doing the job, for example when I installed proxmox (based on Debian 12) this week, ventoy couldn’t do it. Apparently this is a known issue in ventoy.
But yeah, for most isos, ventoy is the way of you install OSes somewhat often, as it contains partition layouts and boot records regardless (I think).
Huh thanks for the link. I knew that just dd’ing doesn’t work for windows Isos but I didn’t know that it was the Linux distros doing the weird shenanigans this time around
It is really informative! Spread the word.
Btw do you know how uutils (rust rewrite of GNU coreutils) is doing?
Wrong license still but I just read an article saying they are making progress on compatiabity with the GNU coreutils
What means wrong license? Does it need to be GPL(v3)?
