Yes, Balena Etcher is popular, and it works well on different operating systems, but it's EXE installer is over 140 MB. That's far, far more than is needed for this functionality. Compare Balena Etcher on Windows to
Win32DiskImager, which needs only 12 MB. UNetbootin accomplishes this with just 5 MB. Rufus gets it done with just over 1 MB. That's all you really need on Windows to accomplish this task.
On macOS, no 3rd party software is even required at all. It has a graphical Disk Utility program that makes this easy to do. Major Linux distros also have built-in GUI programs for this. For cross platform GUI, this Usbimager tool appears to fulfill the need too.
The bloat and potential attack surface of Balena Etcher makes me unreasonably sad. I would like to see less of it.
Yes, Balena Etcher is popular, and it works well on different operating systems, but it's EXE installer is over 140 MB. That's far, far more than is needed for this functionality. Compare Balena Etcher on Windows to Win32DiskImager, which needs only 12 MB. UNetbootin accomplishes this with just 5 MB. Rufus gets it done with just over 1 MB. That's all you really need on Windows to accomplish this task.
On macOS, no 3rd party software is even required at all. It has a graphical Disk Utility program that makes this easy to do. Major Linux distros also have built-in GUI programs for this. For cross platform GUI, this Usbimager tool appears to fulfill the need too.
The bloat and potential attack surface of Balena Etcher makes me unreasonably sad. I would like to see less of it.