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Bootable USB drives are a great way to try out a new Linux distribution to see if you like it before you install. While some Linux distributions, like Fedora^[1], make it easy to create bootable media, most others provide the ISOs or image files and leave the media creation decisions up to the user. There's always the option to use dd to create media on the command line—but let's face it, even for the most experienced user, that's still a pain. There are other utilities—like UnetBootIn, Disk Utility on MacOS, and Win32DiskImager on Windows—that create bootable USBs.

About 18 months ago, I came upon Etcher.io^[2], a great open source project that allows easy and foolproof media creation on Linux, Windows, or MacOS. Etcher.io has become my "go-to" application for creating bootable media for Linux. I can easily download ISO or IMG files and burn them to flash drives and SD cards. It's an open source project licensed under Apache 2.0^[3], and the source code^[4] is available on GitHub.

Installing Etcher

Go to the Etcher.io^[5] website and click on the download link for your operating system—32- or 64-bit Linux, 32- or 64-bit Windows, or MacOS.

Etcher provides great instructions in its GitHub repository for adding Etcher to your collection of Linux utilities.

If you are on Debian or Ubuntu, add the Etcher Debian repository:

$echo "deb https://dl.bintray.com/resin-io/debian stable etcher" | sudo tee
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/etcher.list

Trust Bintray.com GPG key
$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 379CE192D401AB61

Then update your system and install:

If you are using Fedora or