RFC: LiveUSB Creator Revamped

[Kamil Paral]

> Hi everyone,
> 
> for quite a while, I've been working on implementation of a new, revamped
> UI, designed by Jakub Steiner for the LiveUSB Creator [0]. Currently, me
> and Luke are slowly moving to merge the changes back into the master
> branch of the tree. Some stuff is not done, like descriptions of the
> images or final look of the icons but the really important things are
> already there.

Speaking as someone who has been tasked with testing liveusb-creator every release, can you **please** use a reliable writing method by default? That means dd and overwriting the whole target device. The "cp mode" is the reason why this tool mostly never worked for anyone (my perception might be somewhat skewed here by being in QA). The time has changed and USB flash drives are now ubiquitous and cheap, there's no problem in finding a drive that can be completely overwritten and boots reliably. The cp mode, however, is guaranteed to fail unless the person knows a magic --reset-mbr commandline argument (or knows to tick that gibberish box in your new UI).

This tool is now clearly targeted at unskilled users and newcomers. Do you really expect them to understand what "The Master Boot Record on your device does not match your system's syslinux MBR" means? Really? And why? (I'm quite surprised this is OK from Jakub's point of view, GNOME designers usually try to make the app as simple and devoid of any options as possible.)

Honestly, I'd be very pleased if you removed the cp mode completely. It causes much more trouble than it's worth, and advanced users can do the same thing with livecd-iso-to-disk script. It's nice that liveusb-creator has a new fancy skin, but the UI was never the biggest issue - the issue was that the default writing mode almost never worked. This is also the reason why we moved this tool far far down on the official USB writing instructions page [1] and why we had no big regrets removing this tool from the official docs completely this cycle, had the tracebacks not been resolved shortly before release.

I don't want to belittle anyone's work here, there has been obviously put a lot of time into this, and that's great. I'm just really surprised that something I see as "the number 1 problem by far" doesn't seem to have been changed at all, by looking at the video.

Thanks for considering,
Kamil

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB


PS: I tried to run it, but I get:

$ sudo liveusb-creator 
QQmlApplicationEngine failed to load component
qrc:/liveusb.qml:4 module "QtQuick.Dialogs" is not installed
qrc:/liveusb.qml:2 module "QtQuick.Controls" is not installed
qrc:/liveusb.qml:4 module "QtQuick.Dialogs" is not installed
qrc:/liveusb.qml:2 module "QtQuick.Controls" is not installed

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/sbin/liveusb-creator", line 103, in <module>
    main()
  File "/sbin/liveusb-creator", line 94, in main
    LiveUSBApp(opts, sys.argv)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/liveusb/gui.py", line 986, in __init__
    engine.rootObjects()[0].show()
IndexError: list index out of range