While so, you have to download a program from somewhere. If I gave this to my mother she would just totally click the wrong link, infect her windows machine and give up.
For the tech, sure but for common people not so.
Why cannot Ubuntu just offer a download media creation tool like Windows does. Surely it's not that hard to couple dd with a batch gui.
Fedora does, fwiw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Media_Writer
looks like it’s not just for fedora either. though that is still a little more complicated than an all in one ubuntu/mint/whatever installer. maybe someone should fork it and/or add that to this.
Fedora media writer is fantastic. You're right, it can either automatically download a fedora iso, or you can just feed it any image. Its so simple and handy for me, to the point a recent foray back to Debian was cut short because there was no included equivalent and the alternatives were just a hassle.
Although, the `cat liveimage.iso > /dev/sdX` tip mentioned in this thread is very handy and is probably enough for me. Anything I can do without a distro specific tool is a win.
I use it but I'm very careful about it since it just puts hard drives and usb sticks into the same category. Most of the time that's fine but if you have hard drives smaller than the usb stick in your system it'll autoselect the hard drive instead and if you're not carefull you're fucking your live system.
And having to go through this insanity each time is even worse
Ubuntu and Linux Mint are now recommending balenaEtcher, which is easier to use than Rufus.