Impression is a excellent image writing tool for Linux desktops, and with its latest release it’s become even more useful.
How so?
By making it seriously easy to download ISO images for a wide range of Linux distros directly within the app itself, including new-ish versions of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Fedora:
You can continue to download an ISO from elsewhere yourself and then use Impression to flash it to a USB, SD card, etc – that core capability has not changed.
But there is a wild convenience in being able to open an image writer tool use it to download the ISO you want to flash. The Raspberry Pi Imager app has similar functionality and I love it (though, admittedly, it’s not alway “in sync” with the latest releases).
Impression downloads ISOs to a temporary cache folder somewhere in the Flatpak filesystem so you can, if needed, retrieve/reuse them to create another bootable installer.
Still, it’d be nice if the app provided an option to expressly “save” downloaded images, for peace of mind (and my bandwidth) if nothing else.
I should also note that you can’t (currently) use Impression to download an ISO without first inserting a USB or SD card to write to (so if you read this hoping you’d found a fancy ISO-fetching front-end be aware: you need to stick something in).
Other changes in the new Impression 3.0 release include revised terminology throughout the interface (to make the tool easier to understand and use confidently), plus a handful of security and bug fixes.
While we’re not short of USB image writer apps for Linux, with everything from the Electron-based epic BalenaEtcher through to advanced command line tools like dd, Impression makes a solid impression by doing everything it needs to, plus a few things different.
Interested in trying out?
You can install Impression from Flathub.
