Burning an ISO to a Flash USB stick or a CD/DVD is the first step to install a new operating system on a machine, and it is a straight-forward process too. For example, when I used to use Windows operating systems, Rufus was my first choice to burn an ISO image, and on debian or Ubuntu, it was Etcher. However, now that I’m using Arch Linux, both of them didn’t work or weren’t even available.

How to do it on Arch Linux:

A couple days earlier I tried to burn an ISO to a USB stick, but surprisingly, my hunt for a GUI tool was not fruitful. I tried most of the tools that were mentioned on the ArchWiki, but none of them seemed to work. Following that, I decided to take things into my own hands and head towards the cli.

Fortunately, all it took was a one-line command, specifically dd. I will demonstrate how to use it correctly to burn an ISO.

Replace /dev/sda with the path of your USB stick.

sudo dd if=/path/to/iso-file/debian.iso  of=/dev/sda  status=progress

And that did the trick for me. Well, now that I figured that it is this simple, there is no coming back to GUI tools.