I am shocked by this - the quote in below is very concerning:
“However, in 2024, the situation changed: balenaEtcher started sharing the file name of the image and the model of the USB stick with the Balena company and possibly with third parties.”
Can’t see myself using this software anymore…
Don’t you need to mark usb disks as bootable if you want to boot from them to install Linux or whatever
that’s not something i’ve ever had to do, i’ve only done that for hard drives.
i think it depends on the image you get - for archlinux you can simply cat (or dd) the file onto a usb stick and it works perfectly fine, bootable. but i think i have seen an image at some point where it didn’t work, but i don’t recall what it was.
It won’t depend. I think it’s because back in the day we never had an easy way to force boot a device, if a device wasn’t flagged as bootable it wouldn’t boot