For the odd occasion where I need a DVD for some reason, I had been using K3B. Previously, I knew how to do it with mkisofs and cdrecord, but it's kind of tedious.

Turns out you can also just use growisofs from the command line.

growisofs -Z /dev/sr0 -speed=1 -R -J .

where -Z will start a new session on a blank disc, and -M can append to a past session.

That being said, multi-session discs from Windows don't like to mount on Linux for some reason. I have not found a solution, but photorec can still rescue your data if you have old files you're after. Photorec also works with /dev/sr0 if you have a disc with corrupted FS that you need to recover.

-speed=1 forces the slowest supported write speed. I think the advice is burn at half the supported speed of your disc. I go as slow as possible since I use a semi-broken laptop drive with a slimline SATA power adapter that is duct-taped to my desktop, which is quite vibration prone as well.

-R and -J enable Rocky Ridge and Joilet extensions to have more the 8 uppercase letters for filenames…

Note: for some reason, the first -Z ended up burning and using like 300MB even though I had a couple of MB of documents to burn. Not sure why. K3B DOES burn it properly so there is something wrong here.

NOTE: this does not fully work for Blu Ray. It ends up using a ton of space and needs some experimentation.