NOTE: The article referenced below is about the Linux version, but the program itself is cross-platform, with Linux, Mac, and Windows versions available.

Making live USB disks on Linux has always been hit or miss. You could use dd and the command line, and it’s mostly a good tool, but a lot of times the dd tool can destroy a drive. Other GUI tools like Unetbootin or Gnome disks are good too, but they’re mostly hit or miss, and sometimes the flashing gets messed up.

This is why Etcher is such a great tool. It’s elegant, so anyone can use it easily, and it doesn’t mess up when you flash an image. There is no more making a bootable flash drive with Unetbootin only to find out that a .c32 menu file is missing or some other error.

Source: Make Linux Live Disks Easily with Etcher (Make Tech Easier)
Software web site: http://www.etcher.io/

The thing we like most about this software, besides the fact that it’s free, is that it is smart enough to try to prevent you from accidentally overwriting one of your hard drives by mistake! And also, we like the fact that the Linux version is packaged as an AppImage, which means it should just run on whatever Linux distribution you use, once you have set permissions. At the worst you may need to install FUSE, if it’s not already installed in your distribution. That only applies to the Linux version; the OS X and Windows versions are installed just like any normal software package for those platforms.

We can think of several other Linux applications that we wish were packaged like this, particularly ones that have a higher than usual risk of breakage any time you apply an update. But, that’s a whole other article for another time.