There’s a Gnome in the KDE

I’m refreshing a laptop that I’m giving to a family member and I want to image the shiny new Ubuntu 20.04 onto a USB3 thumbdrive to send with the machine as a secondary backup to the Ubuntu Linux already installed as primary boot on the laptop as primary backup to Windows10home.

For myself, I just use dd from the command line. I’ve found that bit of magic that does notification as dd does it’s thing so you have an idea of it’s progress, so it’s just too convenient these days. But occasionally I’ve wanted to show other people how to ‘burn’ onto a thumbdrive, or onto an SD card for use in a Pi. And for that I’d like to show of a nice GUI application.

However, I’ve found that the currently recommended drive imaging application in the software center seems to change frequently. I’d like to just have one ‘goto’ app that I can count on that is either installed as default or super securely available on first run. And recently I heard on a podcast that Gnome-Disks does this exact function! I had NO IDEA! Oh, my gawd! I’m in heaven.

Gnome-Disks is a pretty old app that does a lot of useful things intuitively and flawlessly. Plus if you are using a Gnome based desktop it’s usually installed by default. And I am writing this because I use KDE. Gnome-disks is a gnome-toolkit app, but it needs no external libraries! You won’t pull down half the gnome desktop infrastructure to install this one app, often this is not the case. It’s heaven I tell ya!

And there it is. Gnome-Disks will even to full image backups via a GUI if you want.