Impression

Impression is a GNOME Circle application for flashing disk images to USB drives and SD cards. It strips the process down to three steps — pick an image, pick a drive, flash — with a clean GTK4/libadwaita interface that fits naturally into the GNOME desktop. Written in Rust, it uses udisks2 under the hood so no root password prompt is required on systems with polkit configured correctly.

Features

• Dead-simple flashing workflow — select an ISO or IMG file, select a target drive, and write; no extra configuration required.
• Direct ISO downloads — browse and download installation images for popular Linux distributions from within the app without leaving to a browser.
• Compressed image support — write .xz, .gz, and .zst compressed images directly without manually decompressing first.
• udisks2 integration — communicates with udisks2 for safe, policy-controlled access to removable storage without running the whole app as root.
• GNOME Circle quality — follows GNOME Human Interface Guidelines; integrates with the system dark/light theme via libadwaita.
• Drag-and-drop — drop an image file straight onto the window to select it instantly.

Installation

The recommended installation method on any Linux distribution is Flatpak from Flathub:

flatpak install flathub io.github.adhami3310.Impression

Impression is also available in the official repositories of several distributions:

# Arch Linux
pacman -S impression

# Nix / NixOS
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.impression

For Debian and Fedora users, Flatpak is the supported path:

# Debian / Ubuntu / Fedora
# Install via Flatpak (above) or download from https://apps.gnome.org/Impression

Usage

Flashing a local image

1. Open Impression from the GNOME application grid.
2. Click Select Image and choose your .iso, .img, .xz, .gz, or .zst file.
3. Click Next — Impression lists all removable drives detected by udisks2.
4. Select the target USB drive or SD card.
5. Click Write and confirm. Progress is shown inline; the drive is safely unmounted when complete.

Downloading a distribution image

1. Open Impression and click Download an OS on the welcome screen.
2. Browse the list of available distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and others).
3. Select the edition and architecture you need, then click Download.
4. Once the download completes, Impression moves automatically to drive selection.

Running via Flatpak CLI

flatpak run io.github.adhami3310.Impression

Impression vs Balena Etcher

Impression is the natural choice on a GNOME desktop: it is lighter, integrates with the system theme, and does not bundle a browser engine to render its two-screen UI.