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encom • today at 3:05 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

When your flashing app starts getting bigger than the operating systems it's writing, you should start asking yourself some questions.

  ~$ du -h $(which dd)
  76K     /usr/bin/dd
Etcher truly is the clowniest Electron app of them all.

Replies

mort96 • today at 3:46 PM

Better and similar size:

    $ du -h $(which pv)
    116K     /usr/bin/pv
pv has a progress bar and nicer syntax. Next time you need to write an image, try:

    sudo pv -Yo /dev/blah /path/to/your/image.img
The -Y makes it sync after each write so that the progress bar represents actual progress instead of just how fast you can copy to kernel write buffers.

My life improved measurably after I contributed that '-o' flag to pv and it then made its way into all my systems through regular OS updates :)

titzer • today at 3:47 PM

Long live dd! Except every time I use it I am terrified I'll blow out the brains of the wrong device :/

Another example clown app: the MacOS downloads of TuxGuitar, a Java app, used to just ship as a zip with a big jar in it. Now it ships an entire Java Runtime environment specific to your processor architecture. It's 480MB. Derp.

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