Popsicle is a USB image writer. It’s designed for creating bootable installation and recovery media, with particular emphasis on preparing several USB drives from the same disk image.
Rather than running a separate writing operation for each drive, Popsicle lets users prepare multiple devices in a single session. This makes it useful for system administrators, educators, and anyone who regularly needs to distribute identical operating system images.
The application provides a guided graphical interface built with COSMIC. Users select an image, choose the destination devices, initiate flashing, and review the results. A separate command-line interface caters for terminal-based workflows and automation.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Flash ISO and IMG disk images to multiple USB drives simultaneously.
- Supports parallel writing through USB hubs, including USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices.
- Select images through a file chooser or drag and drop.
- Verify source images against SHA512, SHA256, SHA1, MD5, or BLAKE2b checksums.
- Automatically detect connected USB storage devices and refresh the device list when drives are attached or removed.
- Display device information, including manufacturer, model, device path, and capacity.
- Prevent selection of destination devices that are too small for the chosen image.
- Monitor writing progress and transfer speeds separately for each device.
- Display a summary of successful and failed writing operations, including errors.
- Command-line interface supports explicitly selected drives or all detected USB drives, optional write verification, and machine-readable progress output.
Website: github.com/pop-os/popsicle
Support:
Developer: System76
License: MIT License (core library and CLI); GNU General Public License v2.0 (COSMIC interface)
Popsicle is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Flash OS Images | |
|---|---|
| Ventoy | Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files |
| USBWriter | Cross-platform disk image writer |
| Etcher | Image burner with multi-platform support |
| UNetbootin | Create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu and other distros |
| USB Imager | Lightweight cross-platform utility for writing and verifying disk images |
| Raspberry Pi Imager | Create bootable media. Not only useful for the Raspberry Pi |
| Imagewriter | Write RAW images and ISO images to USB keys |
| Fedora Media Writer | Creates bootable Fedora USB media and supports custom ISOs |
| Caligula | Terminal-based tool for flashing disk images to removable media |
| Impression | Create bootable drives |
| MultiBootUSB | Create multi boot live Linux on a removable USB disk |
| dd | Convert and copy files |
| GNOME Disks | View, modify and configure disks and media |
| MultiWriter | Write an ISO file to multiple USB devices at once |
| Mintstick | Tool for creating bootable USB media and formatting sticks |
| JustDD | USB image writer |
| KDE ISO Image Writer | Simple KDE utility for writing ISO files to USB drives |
| MajUSB | USB bootable drive creator with a GTK4 GUI |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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