Writing a bootable USB Drives is a must if you are one to test out any number of Linux distribution. I used the the SUSE Image Writer for years until it was decided that it would no longer be maintained. I have used Ventoy but my success with that has been hit and miss lately. Fedora has a great Media Writer application that installs smoothly as a Flatpak but I have just felt like it didn’t quite belong on my openSUSE Tumbleweed machine.
Totally by accident, I stumbled upon yet another ISO Image Write by the good folks at KDE. Bonus, it uses the Qt toolkit and looks like it fits right in my Plasma Desktop environment.
Bottom Line Up Front: It does what it needs to do and solves my problem of preparing a USB flash drive with a distribution to install on a machine. I like it, it’s distribution agnostic and super simple. No extra bells or options.
Installation
I am using the Flatpak. This can be installed from the command line (assuming you have the Flathub repo added) :
sudo flatpak install org.kde.isoimagewriterAlternatively, navigate here to it’s official page and select a preferred option there.
https://apps.kde.org/isoimagewriter
It’s a pretty trivial installation and when installed, run it and you will find an interface so simple that there is very little room to mess this up. Assuming you have the ISO of the distribution downloaded, click on the field where it says, “Path to ISO image…” and find the iso you want to write to the USB drive.
Then plug in your USB drive.
Fantastically, you can’t accidentally select an internal drive on your system. At least, that has been my experience. I really appreciate this sort of “idiot proofing” this provides.
After you select create, you will be warned that everything on your USB drive will be overwritten. I truly believe having this additional step of a “sanity check” is crucial to long term user contentment.
You will be prompted with super user authentication and the writing will commence.
Once complete, ISO Image Writer will give you a happy message if it is successful and you can be on your merry way. I am sure that there is an example of a failure message but I have not yet experienced this.
Then the job is done. Now you can install that version of Ubuntu for the brand-new-to-Linux pre-teen so that they can get their school work done on an old, retired 5th Intel HP Laptop.
Final Thoughts
ISO Image Writer is fantastic, simple and works just like one would expect. I have no complaints other than I do wonder where this has been and how I’ve missed it for so long. I’m glad it is there and I am able to use it. I realize that this is a very basic application and to some, completely unnecessary because they know the terminal way of doing it. I need to have the this application because I like for my computer to warn me before I do something silly.
References
https://apps.kde.org/isoimagewriter
https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-users/installation/
