Batocera Download 2026: 43.1 in 12 Steps, 30 Min

Somewhere between "I would like to play a Super Nintendo game" and "I have now spent four hours in a forum thread about libretro core compatibility" sits Batocera, a free operating system whose entire pitch is that it refuses to be a project. You do not install it. You do not maintain a login. You copy it to a USB stick, boot from it, and the computer you were using ten minutes ago is now a games console that forgets everything the moment you pull the drive out. This is either the most elegant idea in the hobby or an elaborate way to avoid commitment. It is, in practice, both.

This is a tutorial, so it will be specific. We are downloading and installing Batocera 43.1, the current stable release as of mid-2026, in twelve steps that take about thirty minutes when your network cooperates and your USB stick is not lying about its capacity. Along the way we will cover the prerequisites nobody mentions until you are stuck, the SHARE partition that is the only part of this system you actually own, the eight or nine most common ways it falls over, and a complete working batocera.conf you can steal. First, the part everyone skips: understanding what you are about to run.

What Batocera Actually Is

A distribution, not an app

The single most durable misconception about Batocera, repeated in one thread and refuted in the same thread every ninety minutes, is that it is a program you run inside Windows. It is not. Batocera is a complete Linux distribution, with its own kernel, its own drivers and its own opinions, that boots straight into a games menu instead of a desktop. The official download page and the project's GitHub both describe it in the same words: an open-source, completely free retro-gaming distribution that can be copied to a USB stick or SD card to turn any computer into a gaming console. The word that carries the weight there is distribution. You are not launching an emulator. You are, for the duration of the session, replacing the computer's brain.

That framing explains everything else about how it behaves. It is why you flash it to a disk rather than double-click a setup wizard. It is why it does not care what operating system was on the machine before. And it is why, when it works, it works with a silence commercial software has forgotten how to produce: no telemetry prompt, no account, no "welcome to your journey." It boots, it shows you a wall of console logos, and it waits. The 43 line runs on kernel 6.15.11 and, on the AMD and Intel image, a Wayland session with the LabWC compositor rather than the older X stack, which is the sort of detail that matters exactly once, on the day a driver misbehaves.

The hardware it runs on

Batocera's reach is deliberately wide. Current builds cover the Raspberry Pi 2 through Pi 5, x86_64 PCs and mini PCs, and, in the documentation's own phrase, "dozens of ARM handhelds." That last category is where the project quietly became default firmware for a whole shelf of devices; if you own something like the flagship covered in our Retroid Pocket 6 breakdown, Batocera is one of the images people reach for first. The same philosophy that turns a dead office PC into a console turns a two-hundred-dollar handheld into a more honest version of itself. If you want raw silicon-level accuracy instead of software emulation, that is a different religion entirely, and one we cover in the MiSTer Multisystem 2 piece; Batocera is not trying to be an FPGA and does not pretend to be.

What it does not ship, and why that is deliberate

Here is the part the marketplaces would rather you not think about. Batocera ships with more than 200 preconfigured systems and cores, and zero games. It ships with the folders for BIOS files and none of the BIOS files. This is not an oversight; it is the only defensible way to distribute the software. "Abandonware" is a community sentiment, not a legal category, and a PlayStation BIOS is copyrighted whether or not Sony is still selling the console it came from. The distribution itself is offered under a non-commercial Creative Commons licence, copyright 2016 to 2026, which is precisely why the people flipping "pre-loaded" SD cards on auction sites are on doubly thin ice: they are charging for software they were told not to sell, wrapped around ROMs they had no right to copy. The lawful path is the boring one. You supply your own dumps from your own cartridges. Batocera supplies the machine to run them on.

Prerequisites: Hardware and Software

Hardware: the x86_64-v3 line in the sand

The published floor is modest: 1 GB of RAM minimum, 2 GB recommended. That is enough for 8- and 16-bit systems and light 3D. It is not enough for PlayStation 2 or GameCube, which need real GPU horsepower regardless of how much system memory you throw at them; no amount of RAM turns an Atom netbook into a PS2. On the PC side there is a harder, quieter requirement that trips people up: the AMD and Intel image is compiled for the x86_64-v3 microarchitecture level, which means the CPU must support AVX2. In human terms that is roughly Intel Haswell (2013) or AMD's Zen and later. A genuinely ancient Core 2 Duo will not boot the modern image, and the error you get will be unhelpful. Know this before you blame the USB stick.

Storage: the card is not a footnote

The absolute minimum is a 16 GB card or stick, but the recommendation is 32 GB, and the reason is specific rather than superstitious: under 16 GB of free space, Batocera's automatic updater simply will not run. The compressed image is around 3 GB and expands to roughly 8 GB once written, and on first boot the data partition grows to fill whatever is left. Buy an A1 or A2-rated card from a brand you have heard of. Random-I/O rating, not sequential headline speed, is what determines whether menus feel instant or like wading. Counterfeit high-capacity cards that report 256 GB and store 8 are a genuine plague; a card that "corrupts" on second boot was usually fake on first boot.

Software: what to install on your other machine

You need a working computer to write the image, and one flashing tool. The official install guide recommends balenaEtcher or the Raspberry Pi Imager, both of which read the compressed .img.gz directly and refuse, sensibly, to overwrite your system drive. Linux users who prefer the command line can use dd, with the caveat that dd does exactly what you tell it and offers no second chances. You will also want an Ethernet cable for the first update if you can manage one; Wi-Fi setup is a solved problem but a wired connection removes an entire class of first-boot frustration. That is the whole shopping list: a card, a flasher, and a cable.

Picking the Right Image

Reading the filename

Batocera images follow a strict, legible naming pattern: batocera-(architecture)-(version)-(date).img.gz. The x86_64 build of 43.1 released on the thirtieth of May arrives as batocera-x86_64-43.1-20260530.img.gz. That single filename tells you the target architecture, the exact version and the build date, which is more transparency than most consumer firmware offers all year. The one thing it does not encode is whether it is right for your device, which is entirely your job to get correct, because a PC image will not boot a Raspberry Pi and a Pi image will not boot a PC. They are different CPU families speaking different machine code.

PC vs Pi vs handheld

The download page splits images by hardware family, and the architecture strings are worth knowing because they surface again later. A Pi 5 uses bcm2712; a Pi 4 or 400 uses bcm2711; a Pi 3 uses bcm2837. Desktop and mini PCs use plain x86_64, while the newer AVX2-optimised build is labelled x86_64-v3 and is the right pick for anything Zen-3-class or a Steam Deck. Rockchip handhelds use rk3588; the Anbernic RG35XX family uses the Allwinner h700. If you are ever unsure which board a running Batocera thinks it is on, one command settles it, which we will get to in the advanced section. Notably, this breadth is where Batocera pulls ahead of the old guard: as covered in our look at RetroPie frozen at v4.8, that project still ships no Raspberry Pi 5 image at all, while Batocera has supported the Pi 5 for well over a year.

Where to actually download it

There is exactly one first-party source, batocera.org/download, and you should use it. Pick your hardware, take the stable release rather than a nightly unless you enjoy filing bug reports, and download the .img.gz. Do not download Batocera from a video description, a file-locker, or a marketplace listing; a modified image is a supply-chain problem wearing a friendly logo. The official mirrors, including the ones the update system itself uses, are listed in the wiki, and they are the only URLs worth trusting.

The 12-Step Install

Before you write: back up and identify the target

Flashing is a raw, sector-level write. It does not merge, it does not ask, and it does not distinguish between your empty USB stick and the drive holding your dissertation. The two commands below exist to make sure you never confuse the two. Run them, read the output, and only then proceed.

# List what you actually downloaded. Compressed size should be roughly 3 GB.
ls -lh batocera-x86_64-43.1-20260530.img.gz

# Decompress it. dd and other low-level tools cannot read .gz directly;
# balenaEtcher and Raspberry Pi Imager can, so for those this step is optional.
gunzip -k batocera-x86_64-43.1-20260530.img.gz

Expected output from the listing, give or take:

-rw-r--r-- 1 you you 3.0G Jul 24 09:14 batocera-x86_64-43.1-20260530.img.gz

Now identify the target device so you cannot possibly write to the wrong one:

lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,TRAN

NAME    SIZE MODEL                TRAN
sda   931.5G Samsung SSD 870      sata
sdb    28.9G SanDisk Ultra Fit    usb

The 28.9 GB device on the USB transport is your target. The 931.5 GB SATA device is your operating system. Do not mix them up. Everything that follows depends on this one line of attention.

The twelve steps

Each step has a reason. The reasons are the difference between a tutorial and a list of magic words.

1. Confirm your hardware clears the floor. At least 1 GB of RAM, and on a PC a CPU new enough for the x86_64-v3 image (AVX2, roughly 2013 onward). Rationale: wrong architecture means it either will not boot or crawls, and the error message will not tell you that is why.
2. Download the correct image from batocera.org/download. Match the architecture to your device exactly. Rationale: a Pi image and a PC image are not interchangeable; the CPU cannot execute the other's code.
3. Sanity-check and decompress the file. Confirm the roughly 3 GB size, then gunzip it if your flasher needs a raw .img. Rationale: a truncated download is the single most common cause of a "corrupt" flash that was never corrupt, just incomplete.
4. Get a real 32 GB A1/A2 card or stick. Not the 8 GB freebie from a trade show. Rationale: under 16 GB the auto-updater refuses to run, and cheap media is where phantom instability is born.
5. Identify the target device with lsblk. Note the exact device node, for example /dev/sdb. Rationale: the next step is irreversible and device-node-specific; guessing here destroys data.
6. Flash the image. Use balenaEtcher or Raspberry Pi Imager (they take the .img.gz directly), or dd on Linux. Rationale: this is a whole-disk write, not a file copy; the tool has to operate below the filesystem.
7. Wait for verification to finish. Let the flasher validate the write; do not yank the stick early. Rationale: an unverified or interrupted write produces a stick that boots halfway and then hangs, which is maddening to diagnose after the fact.
8. Set the target machine to boot from USB. In UEFI, move the stick to the top of the boot order, and disable Secure Boot and Fast Boot. Rationale: Secure Boot rejects Batocera's unsigned kernel outright; Fast Boot can skip the USB device entirely.
9. Boot from the stick. Cold boot with the display already on the correct input. Rationale: a display powered on after the machine can miss the HDMI handshake and show "no signal" on a system that is booting perfectly.
10. Let first boot build and expand the data partition. Do not interrupt it; the screen may sit briefly. Rationale: this is when the SHARE partition grows to fill the card, and it is where all your future data will live.
11. Configure your controller. Hold a button to trigger detection, or map it manually. Rationale: EmulationStation is a controller-first interface, and nothing else is comfortable until this is done.
12. Connect networking and run the first update. Ethernet or Wi-Fi, then Main Menu, then UPDATES AND DOWNLOADS, then START UPDATE. Rationale: Batocera ships-then-patches, and going from 43 to 43.1 on day one fixes a genuine batch of bugs, covered later.

For the dd path specifically, the command is short and the warning is long:

# Confirm /dev/sdb is the 28.9G USB stick from lsblk, NOT your 931G system disk.
sudo dd if=batocera-x86_64-43.1-20260530.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync
sync

Running from USB vs installing to internal

By default you are done: Batocera runs from the stick, touches nothing on the internal drive, and is fully reversible by unplugging it. That is the low-risk mode the entire design is built around, and for a machine you also use for other things it is the correct choice. If instead you have a dedicated box and want Batocera permanently on its internal SSD, the option lives under SYSTEM SETTINGS, then INSTALL BATOCERA ON A NEW DISK. That path wipes the target disk you select, so it is the one step in this whole tutorial where you should read the confirmation prompt twice. The running-from-USB approach costs you nothing but a stick, and it is the one I would keep.

First Boot and the SHARE Partition

What happens on first boot

The first boot is slower than every boot after it, and that is intentional. Batocera detects the size of your card and expands the data partition to fill the free space, which is why you want that 32 GB card rather than a 16 GB one: the difference is entirely usable ROM and save space. You will see the boot logo, possibly a short pause on a black screen while the resize happens, and then the EmulationStation front-end with its wall of system logos. If the pause makes you nervous, that nervousness is the most common cause of a genuinely broken install, because the fix people reach for is pulling the power mid-resize. Do not. Let it finish.

The two-partition model

This is the concept that makes everything else about Batocera make sense. The card is split into two partitions with completely different jobs. The first is a small, read-only BOOT partition holding the operating system and every emulator core; you never edit it, and updates rewrite it wholesale. The second is the large SHARE partition, mounted internally at /userdata, which holds your ROMs, BIOS files, saves, screenshots, cheats and your batocera.conf. Because updates only touch the read-only boot partition, your data on SHARE survives every upgrade untouched. This is the entire reason updating Batocera is safe in a way that updating a hand-built emulation setup never is: the code and your data are physically separate.

Controller and network setup

EmulationStation assumes a controller. Plug one in over USB and it is usually detected on the spot; hold any button and the mapping wizard walks you through every input in order. Bluetooth pads pair from the same menu once the controller service is running, though a wired connection for the first session removes a variable. For networking, Ethernet needs no configuration at all, which is why it is worth a cable for setup day. Wi-Fi lives under NETWORK SETTINGS: enable it, pick your SSID, enter the key. Networking is not decorative here; it is what feeds the updater, the metadata scraper and, if you want them, online features, so getting it connected now saves three trips back to this menu later.

Adding ROMs and BIOS Files

The folder layout

Once Batocera is on the network, it advertises its SHARE partition as a plain network folder. From Windows or macOS you reach it at \\BATOCERA\share; from Linux at smb://BATOCERA.local/share; and if name resolution is being difficult, \\192.168.1.X\share with the device's actual IP always works. Locally, that same share is /userdata. The structure is rigid and self-explanatory:

/userdata/                (network: \\BATOCERA\share)
├── roms/
│   ├── snes/
│   ├── megadrive/
│   ├── nes/
│   ├── psx/
│   └── ...          (200+ system folders, one per console)
├── bios/
├── saves/
├── screenshots/
├── cheats/
└── system/
    └── batocera.conf

How Batocera finds games

Every console has a short-name folder under roms/, and every one of those folders contains a hidden _info.txt that lists exactly which file formats that system accepts. When you are unsure whether Batocera wants a .sfc or a .smc, that file is the authority, and it beats guessing. Drop your ROMs into the matching folder, then tell the interface to rescan: press START, open GAME SETTINGS, and choose UPDATE GAMELISTS, or simply reboot, which rescans everything. The cores under the hood are the same libretro cores you would install by hand elsewhere; if you want to understand what is actually running each system, our guide to installing 200 RetroArch cores maps the same territory from the manual side. Batocera just did the wiring for you.

BIOS files and the law

Some systems will not run, or will run badly, without their original BIOS: PlayStation, Saturn, and several others expect the real firmware. Batocera tells you exactly what is missing through Main Menu, GAME SETTINGS, MISSING BIOS, which lists every required file and the precise checksum it expects. Place the files in /userdata/bios with the exact names shown, and the red warnings clear. The authoritative list of which core needs which BIOS lives in the libretro BIOS documentation and the wiki's add games and BIOS page. As with ROMs, Batocera ships none of these files, for the legal reasons already covered. Dump them from hardware you own. The checksum check exists partly so you can confirm your dump is correct, which is a favour the marketplaces never do you.

Updates and Downloads

The menu path

Batocera's update system is one menu deep and hard to get wrong. Press START from any system or game list to open the main menu, then go to UPDATES AND DOWNLOADS. Inside, START UPDATE pulls the latest build for your architecture, rewrites only the read-only boot partition, and asks you to reboot to apply it. Because your SHARE partition is never touched, going from 43 to 43.1 costs you nothing but a download and a restart. The same section houses the Content Downloader, which fetches themes, bezels and other optional extras straight from the project rather than from a stranger's link.

Updating over SSH

If you prefer a terminal, or you are updating a headless box, SSH is enabled by default. Log in as root with the password linux (change it, see the advanced section) and run one command:

ssh root@batocera        # the default host name on the LAN
# password: linux

batocera-upgrade

Expected output looks roughly like this:

Checking for updates...
Current version: 43
Latest  version: 43.1
Downloading batocera-x86_64-43.1-20260530 ...
[####################] 100%
Update written to the boot partition. Reboot to apply.

The batocera-upgrade tool has shipped since version 5.23, so it is on every build you are likely to touch. It reports the log inline, which makes it the better option when a graphical update stalls and you want to see why.

The manual upgrade escape hatch

Occasionally an over-the-air update will not complete, usually because the boot partition is tight or a mirror is slow. There is a fully supported manual path for exactly this. Download the boot.tar.xz for your target version, drop it into /userdata/system/upgrade, and run batocera-upgrade manual. This route has existed since v39 and pulls from the same official mirrors the automatic updater uses, so it is a fallback, not a hack. The updates and downloads wiki page documents both the version numbers and the mirror list, and it is worth a bookmark before you need it rather than after.

Five Pitfalls and Their Fixes

Flashing and boot pitfalls

Pitfall 1: Secure Boot silently rejects the stick. The machine boots straight back into Windows and never shows Batocera, with no error. Batocera's kernel is unsigned by design, so UEFI Secure Boot refuses it. The fix is to enter firmware setup, disable Secure Boot and Fast Boot, and put the USB device at the top of the boot order. This is the single most common "it won't boot" cause on modern PCs, and it is not a Batocera bug.

Pitfall 2: the sub-16 GB card that never updates. Everything works, but START UPDATE does nothing or errors. Under 16 GB of free space, the auto-updater deliberately refuses to run, because it cannot guarantee room to stage the new boot partition. The fix is a 32 GB or larger card, which is the recommended size precisely for this reason. A 16 GB card is the minimum, not the target.

Storage and data pitfalls

Pitfall 3: games in the wrong folder, or the gamelist not refreshed. You copied ROMs over the network, and the system still shows empty. Either they went into the wrong short-name folder, or the interface has not rescanned. Check the folder against its _info.txt, then press START, GAME SETTINGS, UPDATE GAMELISTS, or reboot. Ninety percent of "my games disappeared" posts are one of these two things.

Pitfall 4: the DraStic-to-melonDS save trap. If you are migrating an older Nintendo DS setup, note that the 43 line removed the DraStic emulator in favour of melonDS, and DraStic saves do not transfer. Back up your DS saves before upgrading and be prepared to restart those games, or keep an older build around specifically for them. This is the kind of breaking change that a two-or-three-releases-a-year cadence produces, and the changelog is the only place it is loud about it.

The 3DS decryption pitfall

Pitfall 5: encrypted 3DS ROMs that refuse to load. The 43 line re-added Nintendo 3DS support, but with a firm condition: ROMs must be decrypted, and hardware shaders are off by default for compatibility. An encrypted .3ds dump will sit in the list and fail to launch with an opaque error. Decrypt your dumps first, and only re-enable hardware shaders once you have confirmed a game runs. This is a genuine 2026-era gotcha that did not exist on older Batocera versions, and it catches people who assume their old ROM set will "just work."

Troubleshooting Table

Boot and display

Display and boot problems account for most first-day frustration, and almost all of them have a mechanical cause rather than a mysterious one. Work top to bottom.

Input and audio

Controller and sound issues are usually a menu setting away, not a reinstall away. In particular, note the Microsoft-controller row: the 43.1 patch specifically fixed certain Xbox pads being misdetected as keyboards, so if you hit that, updating is the actual fix.

Reading the table

Match the symptom to the row, apply the fix, and change one thing at a time so you know which change worked.

Advanced Tips

Move your ROMs off the boot media

A serious collection does not belong on the boot card. Batocera can read ROMs from a second internal drive, an external USB disk, or a network share, which keeps the card small and fast while your library lives somewhere roomy. Format a spare drive, let Batocera mount it, and point the ROM directory at it through the storage settings, or mount a NAS share over SMB or NFS. This also makes the boot card disposable in the best sense: if it dies, you re-flash a $10 card and your library, on a separate disk, is untouched. Separation of concerns is the whole Batocera philosophy, extended one layer outward.

Per-system tuning and the board command

Almost every setting Batocera exposes can be set globally, per-system, or per-game, and the interface writes those overrides into batocera.conf for you, so you rarely need to hand-edit. When you do want to look under the hood, the batocera.conf syntax reference documents every key. One genuinely useful diagnostic: if you ever need to confirm which board Batocera thinks it is running on, SSH in and read one file.

ssh root@batocera
cat /boot/boot/batocera.board

bcm2712        # this is a Raspberry Pi 5

On a PC that returns x86_64 or x86_64-v3. This is how you settle an argument about which image you are actually running. On x86 hardware you can also push the machine harder than stock; our GPU overclocking walkthrough applies just as well to a Batocera box as to a Windows one, because the silicon does not care what is booting it.

Change the root password, then add achievements

The default SSH login is root and linux, which is fine on a trusted home LAN and reckless anywhere else. Change it under SYSTEM SETTINGS, SECURITY, or via the config, before you expose the box to anything. With that done, the fun extras are opt-in: enable RetroAchievements in the settings to earn achievements on games that never had them, turn on netplay for online multiplayer through the same cores, or apply CRT and bezel shaders to make a flat panel lie convincingly about being a tube. None of it is required, all of it is one menu away, and none of it touches your saves.

A Complete batocera.conf

The annotated config

Below is a sane, complete starting point for /userdata/system/batocera.conf. The interface writes most of these keys for you, so treat this as a reference for what good defaults look like rather than something you must type by hand. The syntax is plain key=value; comments start with a hash.

# --- system ---
system.language=en_US
system.kblayout=us
system.timezone=America/New_York

# --- network / wifi (leave wifi off if you use Ethernet) ---
wifi.enabled=0
# wifi.ssid=YourNetwork
# wifi.key=YourPassword
system.hostname=BATOCERA

# --- audio ---
audio.volume=90
audio.device=auto           # let Batocera pick the HDMI sink

# --- global emulator defaults ---
global.videomode=default
global.smooth=0             # 0 = sharp pixels, 1 = bilinear blur
global.rewind=0             # off by default; costs performance
global.autosave=0
global.retroachievements=0
# global.retroachievements.username=YOURNAME
# global.retroachievements.password=YOURTOKEN

# --- per-system overrides (examples) ---
snes.core=snes9x
nes.core=fceumm
megadrive.core=genesisplusgx
n64.core=mupen64plus-next
psx.core=mednafen_psx_hw    # sharper; swanstation is the alternative

# --- updates ---
updates.enabled=1
updates.type=stable         # stable, never nightly on a daily driver

Applying it

If you edit the file directly over SSH or the network share, save it and reboot, or from a terminal you can reload the front-end. The cleanest approach is to make changes through the interface wherever possible and reserve hand-editing for keys the menus do not expose. Confirm your free space before and after any change with a quick check:

df -h /userdata

Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2    27G  1.2G   26G   5% /userdata

A sanity checklist

Before you call the install finished, confirm four things: the machine boots to EmulationStation from the stick without touching your internal drive; the controller is mapped; the network is connected and START UPDATE reports you are on 43.1; and at least one game in one system launches and saves. If all four are true, you have a working console. Everything after that, more ROMs, more shaders, more systems, is decoration on a foundation that is already sound.

The Verdict: 43.1 and What 44 Adds

43.1 is the one to run

Run 43.1, not 43. To be precise about the lineage, because the internet routinely gets it wrong: Batocera 43, codenamed Glasswing, shipped on 8 May 2026; 43.1 followed on 30 May 2026 as a stability patch on the same line, not as a separate codename. That patch is not cosmetic. It fixed EmulationStation dropping systems and collections, broken options in the Dolphin core, a Steam and Flatpak issue, broken light-gun support in MAME, and the Microsoft-controllers-as-keyboards bug from the troubleshooting table. This is the argument for the ship-then-patch model: the point release exists specifically to catch what the major missed, and skipping it means volunteering for bugs that are already fixed.

What 44 changes

The next major, Batocera 44, is already taking shape, and its early feature list shows the project is still expanding rather than coasting. It adds ZSO compression support for PlayStation 2 ROMs under the PCSX2 core, a meaningful storage win for a system whose discs are enormous, and early support for the Anbernic RG Vita Pro handheld. That cadence, a new major two or three times a year with the previous one being v42 "Papilio" back on 12 October 2025, is faster than most rival front-ends manage, and it is why Batocera hardware support tends to arrive first.

Should you bother

Yes, and the comparison makes the case for you. Batocera is free, boots from a stick without endangering your data, supports over 200 systems out of the box, and ships images for hardware its rivals still ignore. The most-starred competitor, RetroPie, has more GitHub stars, roughly 10,000 to Batocera's 3,000 as of mid-2026, but its last image is stuck at v4.8 from March 2022 and it offers no Raspberry Pi 5 build at all, a gap we detail in the RetroPie frozen-at-v4.8 piece. Popularity is not currency; shipping is. Batocera keeps shipping. Download 43.1, flash it, and stop paying for what open-source already does better.