The author could use a bit of humility.
ISO isn’t useful in the author’s use-case. That’s fine, it is their project to do as they will. ISOs may still have uses elsewhere, such as PXE boot or just a near universally mountable read only container.
The author’s point to the age of the original ISO standard is irrelevant. Many old technologies are reliable and widely adopted, which in and of itself may make it superior to more modern technologies.
Author’s project, author’s will. But that was difficult to read due to their attitude and beyond the author’s use case, didn’t provide a reason for universally retiring ISO.
[delayed]
I think I read the article s bit differently. The headline is a bit click-bate, but in the article they never state that the format has to die in general, but that this distribution has killed it of, with explanations on why that is.
I agree, the author appears to conflate file and format. From a complete reading of this post and the author’s previous post on this topic, I read it as discontinuation of distribution of the ISO file, but in both posts they use the wording “ISO format” almost interchangeably.
> I maintain that the ISO format has "had it's day" and needs to be retired.
Replace “format” with “file <for booting computers>” and most rebuttals would go away. There will always be edge cases, but this is again the author’s project, so their word is god.
I personally wouldn’t recommend ISOs for PXE booting longer. It requires loading the entire disc into memory first which is going to be slower than purpose built netboot images.
These days I tend to just run a local mirror of NetBoot.xyz for personal use. Not needed to use PXE booting professionally for around 10 years but I’m sure others out there might still be using it.
I do agree with you that universally retiring ISO is a bit dramatic. However I do think their usefulness is greatly diminished these days.
> It requires loading the entire disc into memory first which is going to be slower than purpose built netboot images.
I'm not sure it does require loading the entire image. Servers (Dell/HP) that allow remote mounting iso images will use HTTP-Range requests to be able to 'seek' the disk. I _thought_ (but honestly don't remember) iPXE was capable of range requests too.
I wouldn’t use PXE at all! But I’ve been out of the computer imaging business for a long time, now. The folks that do that where I work simply activate Windows with Intune on first boot from the manufacturer, similar to how Macs are activated.
[delayed]
While the original ISO standard may still have its use cases, your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior. Your false belief that its long life in a group of other standards - is rather a coincidence that is in correlation to its long life and not a cause of it.
Had the USB stick and related softwares for formatting been around sooner .img may have easily won the battle between standards. Unfortunately, CD-ROM was released 1985 and USB flash drives only started really showing up in the early 2000s. We have no way of knowing the counterfactual.
I would read
> Many old technologies are reliable and widely adopted, which in and of itself may make it superior to more modern technologies.
not as arguing that the tech is inherently better in itself, but that being popular for a long time carries benefits, mostly of the form "everything can use this" - consider FAT32, which I think we can all agree is... a product of its time (that seems like a nice way of putting it?), but which remains invaluable because (virtually) everything can read/write it.
> your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior.
That sentence did not end the way I expected given its start.
Survivorship bias does imply that old (surviving) standards are unusually good. That's because standards from the time would have a range of suffering qualities, and the really exceptionally good ones are much more likely to survive in use a very long time.
When discussing whether something should be killed, survivorship isn't a bias — it is evidence. Otherwise the whole process of evolution by natural selection would just be ongoing "survivorship bias".
Didn't say superior, useful. The rest of your comment in quintessential angry performative hn.
I said “may”, not “must”. Please don’t put words in my mouth — you have no idea what my beliefs are behind your keyboard. Thanks.
Ubiquitous adoption is an advantage for a given class of technology. This isn’t survivorship bias, it’s simply consumers finding a given technology useful to them and continuing to use it. Survivorship bias would have required ISO or img to fail and neither have failed (survivorship bias requires a non-survivor).
I can port an ISO between OSes from the early 90s through today. I can’t reliably do that with img as it may not use a universally accepted file system.
(And I did happen to burn a NetBSD ISO for a G4 last month from my M2 Air)
What a strange article. What's called an 'ISO' is, these days, pretty much a thin wrapper for an UDF file system -- you can definitely use it differently as well, but I'm pretty sure nobody has created, say, an ISO9660 plus Joliet plus El Torito image in the past decade or so.
And, no, UDF isn't great either, but I wouldn't say it "has to die": it's a pretty convenient distribution format due to being widely supported, as it's really simple to implement.
So, this mostly seems to be a rant against live-CD-style Linux distros, since those are hard on maintainers (plus: toxic community multiplier)? On the one hand that might be true, on the other hand, the 'hey, here is how you get an ext4 or whatever filesystem in RAM' tooling around that is so mature and convenient that it's hard to see why, and I can't distill any real arguments from this...
Oh I'm sure people still use El Torito today! I remember having to go through that to boot my hobby OS.
Admittedly that was some years ago, but you can still find fresh Github issues of lost souls who still use bootable ISOs
Yeah, but I'd call that 'remnants of El Torito'? You basically have tooling to burp out the MBR, boot catalog and UEFI FAT32 shim, all pointing at the native code that can read your actual (very-much-non-ISO9660) file system into RAM and bootstrap it, and you're good to go on USB, ISO, or whatever.
The first 3 parts aren't that complicated (literally a few sectors with fixed content, maybe a few pointer fixups), and no reason IMHO to want to kill off ISO. Generating that actual file system is the hard work, but also required for live-USB distros, which circles back to the point being made in the article eluding me...
Live CD is mainly replaced with live USB, even if it is called the same nickname.
Whatever dude, I actually do still use CDs but it's not like I care about your distro anyways so go ahead.
ISO-9660 is good at the thing it was designed for, which is a read-only media. If it was made for USB sticks it would have indirect-blocks so that files could be trivially expanded.
It's not clear what the author thinks it the "death" of ISO-9660 would entail. It's not like it's the subject of constant development or is mandatory for anything other than optical discs. Perhaps he thinks he can influence a sudden and widespread removal of ISO-9660 modules from OSes, FUSE, and archive utilities?
Also not sure what's so difficult about it, I thought for the USB-stick case all you do is dd it onto the dev-node and you're good to go? IDK, maybe I'm wrong here, like I said I prefer using CD-R discs on the very rare occasions that I need to install a new linux distro because the alternative is backing up my entire USB stick so I can overwrite it with a new FS and then restore it from backup. And also I always have stacks and stacks of CD-Rs on hand because they're cheap as fuck and I need them for an old video game console which is the subject of my primary hobby.
There are many ways in which ISO files are useful. You have native support in Linux and Windows (you can mount). You usually also have support in virtualization or emulation software like VMWare Parallels, VirtualBox, HyperV…
So I get it Etcher for someone who wants to do it on a USB stick is probably as easy if not easier than using cat or dd. I reckon I can probably create the ISO file with Etcher too. But I’ve installed countless distros and never had to download Etcher since I could always point the virtual CD to an ISO file.
Bonus point. I don’t need to learn anything about file systems and partitions and block sizes… it just works. I have no idea how these bootable medias work since I never had to make one.
I think the author is confusing "ISO format" with "read-only install media".
The posts make a lot more sense once I make that substitution. There are other errors too (for example, there's nothing stopping you from adding additional partitions in the hybrid case).
But I'm pretty sure there are quite a few "partition/filesystem/distro UUID/key/whatever" things that need to be wiped if you boot from an image directly, and this needs to be considered very carefully. Installing an OS twice should NOT be byte-for-byte identical, and if it is that's a security/reliability problem.
Why would it be a security problem if installing an OS twice was byte for byte identical? Don’t distributions (like Fedora Silverblue) already do this?
Mainly cryptographic keys like the SSH host key, or stored RNG state. But this can very easily be mitigated using `cloud-init` or similar.
I'm not sure if they actually share /usr or unconditionally rebuild it on each device (after all, they do need to handle different sets of installed programs).
But /etc/ and /var/ in particular need to be system-specific regardless (even though you may be used to thinking of them as being on the same filesystem as /usr/).
You can just leave those entirely empty these days.
> But /etc/ and /var/ in particular need to be system-specific regardless.
System-specific bits like /etc/machine-id get created by the booted system; the installer doesn't need to create them.
"ISO format" could mean a lot of things, I'm happy this is not about the date format (ISO 8601 )
Was expecting gripes about ISO 8601 format
What a useless page. Maybe put less effort into insults and put the actual explanation front-and-centre rather than burying it in a linked page.
Really I would have concur with the author if dealing again and again with a need to fit the media contents into 650MB (if it is intended to be put at real ISO) or to guarantee how combination of 1) realmode bootloader + 2) UEFI bootloader + 3) ISO-only thunk + 4) UDF volume bizarrely interlace in a single byte stream.
Bootloaders are dodgy even without such a complication. Freeing oneself from all this may give just a moral sense of deliverance...
Isn't the .iso "format" just a byte-by-byte dump of a disc? Just like how a .img is a byte-by-byte dump of... whatever drive? What does it mean that that one of these "formats" to "die"? How do you kill a "format" that's just a straight copy of something?
Nah, there are specific formats for isos. The full spec name is ISO_9660 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660
In a certain sense you're right that in practice dumping the bytes of a disc into a file is what gave people the files, but those discs did have a structure to them. I think what's being said here is that constructing an image in the iso 9660 structure is past its time
I don't think that's what they're referring to? If that's what they mean, then it's very confusing -- and makes me think if they themselves are confused. It's like saying "we should stop shipping Joliet files" or "we should stop shipping UDF files", which makes no sense. ISO 9660 is a filesystem, not a "file format". Yet they write:
> EasyOS ships as a .img file, that is written to a drive. Barry stopped shipping EasyOS as an ISO file from early 2020.
I presume they mean the standard hybrid ISO9660 LiveCD format that Linux distros tend to use. There's a lot of nuance there that I haven't touched in years but needless to say between having multiple boot paths (I think like three--El Torito, BIOS boot sector, and UEFI) and very different media (CDROMs are, well, ROMs, thumb drives are writeable) there can be some complexity if you want to handle some more sophisticated portable OS stuff than just "run the OS installer". I'm sure this is particularly important for persistence, which can sort of be done with "traditional" live media but requires some special effort.
The disc (as in a CD disc) has a format specification that is recognized by the boot firmware. That is what is being copied byte-by-byte, such that the USB drive appears as if it was a CD ROM.
No, the format has not to die. Just some of its usages.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40733040 for previous discussion on this decision. tl;dr: it's not hard to support hybrid ISOs, and there are still a lot of legitimate reasons to want an ISO.
As somebody who deals with game ISOs all the time (whether old PC games or old console games), I'm left mildly confused by the comments saying ISO is irrelevant. There's tons of media out there where the sane way to distribute them is as an ISO.
Damn straight. One time I wanted to use an ISO with a USB stick and it turned into such a giant pain in the ass that I wrote up all the instructions. I still get a ridiculous amount of traffic on this blog page: https://honeypot.net/2011/10/11/making-dos-usb.html
That was one specific ISO in one specific use case. There’s probably a GUI that does all this automatically now. That one time, though, I would’ve sold a kidney for a dd-able image.
But you can get what you want without needing to kill off ISOs for people who need that format instead, with a hybrid ISO, like most other Linux distros already do.
I would say that's fine for Easy to drop their ISO9660 distribution format. The rationale makes good sense.
And of course I'm going to fit in the mold of an entrenched, elderly, "old timer", digging in his heels and I'll re-state a fossilized opinion:
In general, the ISO9660 format is great for distributing disk images for this reason: it's a mature, international, cross-platform standard.
This is not important for a Linux distro that can be set up with ext3/4. But if you distribute something with wide compatibility, you'll still consider making it ISO9660, because a Mac user can roll with it,* and a Linux user will have no problem, nor will a Windows user run into difficulty mounting and reading it.
Likewise, if you wish to generate this filesystem image, any of the above systems, and more, will have an app to create a standards-compliant ISO9660 image. In fact, most of the apps will help with staging all your data and assembling it into a nice package, that you'd otherwise want to make something like a build script to go from a bundle of files and data to a finished ext4 image.
But for Easy, and any other Linux distro, we've long ago phased out actual optical discs (my elderly fossilized brain recalls Knoppix as a revolutionary "live CD only" distro) so swapping in ext4 images may liberate some devs and support techs.
*I don't know actually--do Macs have built-in tools for ISO mounting? They had their own sort of ".dmg" file for "mount as a disk, install this software package", last I checked. And one popular extension is ".img", so Linux distros--stop confusing Mac users!
> I don't know actually--do Macs have built-in tools for ISO mounting?
Yes; it's supported by the same disk image framework as DMG. It's no longer usable for creating bootable images for Apple computers, though.
Apple’s New Disk Image Format used the img extension. Fortunately not something you see anymore.
Double-clicking on an ISO file on macOS mounts it provides the file system is recognized. Read-only though.
I think Windows does the same
In general, the ISO9660 format is great for distributing disk images
for this reason: it's a mature, international, cross-platform standard.
MacOS can indeed mount supported ISO 9660 images from the Finder. The big advantage of ISO 9660 (and I assume UDF) is that the superblock does not conflict with the HFS superblock so you do both with relative ease.