1.) What is the official/recommended way to make ubuntu usbs from image files?, for old releases and newer releases respectively?
My dded dongles don't even initialize when booting!, and I'm fairly confident with dd and ddrescue, less with cp, and have been making backup of drives and stuff so far successfully.
2.) Do the ubuntu usbs have to be usb-creator-gtked in order to boot? If yes, since what release untiol what release? Interested in older releases esspeccially.
If you are working in Windows, you can use Etcher, Rufus, YUMI, Win32DiskImager, UNetbootin, Universal and Ventoy. Etcher and Win32DiskImager will flash an image to an ISO9660 USB. Ventoy will boot the ISO file directly, and the others will extract the image to a file system.
If you are working in Ubuntu, you can use Etcher, Gnome-Disks, mkusb, UNetbootin, dd and Startup Disk Creator. all of these will flash an image to an ISO9660 USB. mkusb will give you the most control, allowing a persistent partition and a data partition if you want.
Most Ubuntu ISO files can be booted directly using the GRUB2 bootloader. This can be done using Ventoy or the mkusb GRUB Template Image, see BIOS/UEFI Template Image for Booting ISO Files
If you want to create your own Live/Persistent USB from scratch in Linux see: Simple Hand Made Persistent USB that Boots either BIOS or UEFI
I personally prefer ddrescue via the gddrescue deb in the repository. It provides a decent output of progress. It is possible to bodge dd (via tools like pv) into giving some progress output. But ddrescue output is just better, in my humble opinion. Here:
$ sudo ddrescue -d -D --force ./ubuntu-22.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso /dev/sdc
As someone already said there is not an "ufficial" way to install ubuntu onto a usb flash drive and dd should work the 100% of the times. If dd did not work for you I suggest to look for some other causes for that, bios and/or hardware failure (failed flash usb or damaged usb interface in the pc).
