Back in may we spotlighted Etcher, a stylish open-source USB image writer app for Windows, macOS and Linux.
In the months since our feature the app has released a over 10 small beta updates, with Etcher 1.5 Beta being the most recent release at the time of writing.
The app is described as “a powerful OS image flasher built with web technologies to ensure flashing an SDCard or USB drive is pleasant and safe experience. It protects you from accidentally writing to your hard-drives, ensures every byte of data was written correctly and much more.”
Bug Fixes n’ Beta Releases
If you haven’t tried out the app since that post you may be interested to learn what’s changed. Well, among plenty of bug fixes, core library updates, and user-experience finesse, are the following notable changes
- Checks for app updates (can be disabled)
- GUI elevation prompt on Linux
- Compression support for gzip and bzip2
- Warning when selected drive is too small
- Warning when selected drive is read-only
- Drag and drop compatible image files on to app
These are in addition to its existing feature set:
Things don’t stop here, though.
Resion.io, the development team behind the app, plan to add more features and capabilities to the tool in due course. Among them:
- Support for creating multi-boot USBs
- Support for persistent storage on Ubuntu images
- Registered Etcher as handler for *.img and *.iso files
Download Etcher Image Writer for Linux
Etcher is a free download and is available direct from the official project website for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Linux packages are distributed as an .appimage for both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux distributions. Appcimages should run across all major Linux distributions without any issues — download, and double-click to run.
Want to also poke around the app’s source or report any bugs you find? You can head on over the project’s Github page: