Looking for an easy-to-use way to create a bootable USB stick on Linux? This nifty new app can help.

This weekend reader Ronald M. sent us the following e-mail about a neat new open-source USB image writer app he came across:

“I wanted to point you at a cool open-source tool that works cross-platform (Windows, OS X, and Linux) for writing images to USB or SD cards. It makes the process of creating a bootable USB stick for Ubuntu really easy, especially as the same directions can be used on any of the major desktop OSes.”

This nifty image burner app is called Etcher and, to quote the project website it is:

“…a powerful OS image flasher built with web technologies to ensure flashing an SDCard or USB drive is pleasant and safe experience. It protects you from accidentally writing to your hard-drives, ensures every byte of data was written correctly and much more.”

IoT company Resin.io is behind the app. Having been ’embarrassed’ by the complexity of existing apps available they set about creating the “ideal SD card writer” that is “…simple for end users, extensible for developers, and works on any platform.”

And in Etcher they’ve achieved just that.

“[It] works the same on Windows, Linux, and OS X”, they explain in an announcement blog post. “No longer should tutorials have special sections for each OS.”

Etcher is built using web technologies. It’s an Electron app “written in JavaScript and supported by a number of npm modules. The UI uses AngularJS, ES6 and Web Components… because we can.”

The app is also available as a command-line app.

Download Etcher Image Writer for Linux, Mac & Windows

You can download Etcher for free directly from the official project website. Binaries are provided for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Yes, Linux; the Linux packages is distributed as an .appimage for 32-bit and 64-bit distributions, and should run across all major Linux distributions without any issues. The team currently have no plan to provide a native .deb (or .rpm) installer.

Official Etcher Downloads

Want to also poke around the app’s source or report any bugs you find? You can head on over the project’s Github page:

Etcher Source Code on Github

Thanks Ronald M.!