What is your honest opinion on EndeavourOS?

I made a post a few days ago asking your opinion on Manjaro and it was very mixed, with a slightly negative overall opinion. I heard some recommend EndeavourOS instead and did some online research and it seems to be pretty solid and not have the repository problem that Manjaro has.

Just for context I am a Linux noob and have only used Mint for about the past six months. While I don’t have any major complaints, I am looking to explore more distros and the Arch repository with its rolling releases. I am not a huge fan of how certain packages on apt are a few years old and outdated. However, I also don’t have the time to be always configuring my OS and just want something that works well out of the box.

Is EndeavourOS a solid choice?

boomer ,
@boomer@beehaw.org avatar

Endeavor is basically an installer for Arch. It is litterally Arch so if arch has issues Endeavor will be affected.

Manjaro, on the otherhand is downstream from arch so when arch has an issue manjaro testinh branches will catch it before they get to the stable stream.

If you want to have fun with the open ocean waves of upstream Arch then go with Endeavor.

It is overly hyped for what it is. They basically took over from Antergos .

AmerXz ,

It’s a great distro but if you want to have more solid experience you could consider do these things

1- install LTS kernel alongside the normal one (especially if you use nvidia) because who knows what would happen in newer bleeding edge kernels .

2- some people like to use timeshift (I don’t use it personally but it’s recommended) and it’s better to make btrfs disk .

3- don’t use aur unless if there is a package that you can’t get by official repos .

Other than that I feel like it’s pretty stable distro and fast but please you have to consider doing these recommendations (from my personal experience)

I hope you enjoy your arch (endeavour os) experience .

Presi300 ,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

Arch with a graphical installer. That’s literally all there is to it. It’s pretty decent imo

gamma ,
@gamma@programming.dev avatar

“Always configuring” isn’t what Arch requires. It requires you to be tolerant of every so often dealing with a bug or two. Currently, the Arch-packaged version of Waybar has a regression which prints fractional seconds when using %T or %S specifiers. A tad annoying, and I could fix it by switching to waybar-git, where it’s been patched. But that hasn’t hit my threshold of annoyance, as I bounce between Sway and KDE.

The grub issue was a bigger deal, and while I knew how to resolve it (liveboot → lsblk and fdisk -l got me all the info I needed, then cryptsetup, mount -o subvol=@, arch-chroot, grub-install) the EOS blog had a nice guide.

But the reason why I chose it? Firewalld and Pipewire by default, customizable welcome app, and pretty simple otherwise.

NixOS will probably fully convert me in a year or two, but I’ve greatly enjoyed my time on Endeavour.

chockblock ,

What’s the advantages of NixOS? Is it really private?

JavaHead ,
@JavaHead@programming.dev avatar

I went to EndeavourOS with i3WM (from dual boot Windows/ Ubuntu) and have been loving the experience. It’s really helped push my boundaries with learning Linux.

dcellini ,

It’s my favorite Linux distro nowadays. It has the DIY element of Arch but without the complexities of its installation process. Effectively that has allowed me to use it as a daily driver on my main machine, but also a stripped down OS for an emulation console with a wide selection of packages. I wasn’t happy with the whole grub fiasco, but the fix was easy and it was nice to see that they added systemd-boot as an option. Overall, it’s pretty easy for me to recommend.

MagneticFusion OP ,

What is the grub fiasco if you care to elaborate

dcellini ,

This is a good explainer. Basically, a grub update caused systems to fail to boot. I think the EndeavourOS team did a nice job responding to it though.

whodoctor11 ,
@whodoctor11@lemmy.world avatar

Is EndeavourOS a solid choice?

Anything that’s Arch based is only solid if that’s the way you will drive the system.

Endeavour is way better than Manjaro since it uses the Arch repos, instead of having parallel repos and delaying a week the updates, so is basically Arch with a Gui installer. Still, tough I understand the appeal to install Arch that way, I think that Endeavour may carry with the hand people that are tech illiterated in the Arch world during the installation, and then it simply abandon they in a system where if you don’t know how it works you will definitely break it. The good part of the long and painful Arch installation process is that it teaches the user about the system.

Anyway, since nowadays Arch has a functional easy installer, Endeavour is kind of pointless to me.

sentient_loom ,
@sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’ve been using it daily for about a year and I have no complaints.

ProtonBadger , (edited )

I use it on my gaming laptop. I've been using Linux in various ways since the nineties and just wanted to install Arch easily while I was brewing coffee, I had it ready to play games from my old Steam SSD within 20min. It installed proprietary NV drivers and keeps them up to date with new versions and kernels without me having to bother with that silliness, likewise for certain multimedia codecs that you have to go look for with other distributions, which is a bother.

However, I had to setup btrfs-assistant+grub-btrfs+btrfsmaintenance scripts myself, I wish it had an install option for that and I'm thinking Garuda might be a better option for this reason as that's configured by default for new users.

It also lacks a GUI app installer, it can be bewildering for newcomers to search for packages with yay and understand pacman/yay stuff. There are ways, like octopi to remedy that but it's not there by default.

TLDR: As an experienced user I enjoy it, I didn't have to waste a lot of time and attn to install and it works well.

mintycactus ,
@mintycactus@lemmy.world avatar

That was the first distro switching from Mac. Obviously. Used for 5 days only. Everything is too simple to make it convinient and easy to use. Top taskbar is absolutly useless, yet takes some vert space. Replacing most default apps or try Mint? Mint was ok (BTW).

yum13241 ,

Top taskbar? Are you sure you didn’t use the vanilla XFCE setup or GNOME? Mint sucks and has a bad track record.

mintycactus ,
@mintycactus@lemmy.world avatar

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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    yum13241 ,

    Mint got hacked and bad ISOs got uploaded, oh and when I used mint, the upgrade from 19.1 to 19.3 didn’t work. Unfixable broken packages.

    EnOS’es Cinnamon is plain cinnamon, without any Mint extras.

    0xeb ,

    My honest opinion is it is a nice Arch based distro with a gui installer

    UnfortunateShort ,

    It has been for me, however no matter which distro you ultimately choose, on Arch I’d very strongly advice to use btrfs as your file system and snapper with snap-pac for snapshotting. It gives you a relatively straightforward way to recover in case you encounter a broken update. At least if it only breaks to a point where your kernel / tty and snapper are still alive and well.

    It’s very easy to set up, but if your really want it out of the box (and even with bootable snapshots), you could give Garuda Linux a try. I’d advice to have a look at the different versions, especially Dr43gonized and KDE minimal. Dr43onized Gaming is very bloated and only good to get to know some cool software imo.

    ethd ,

    It’s exactly as most people describe: Arch with a Calamares installer, for all the good and bad that entails. I’ve never been sold on Arch for daily driver use since stability and simplicity is paramount to me, so I tend to use Fedora as a relatively up-to-date distro that I can generally trust not to totally break.

    However, if you really want to jump in both feet first into troubleshooting and learning Linux, Arch and EndeavourOS are fantastic. Neither holds your hand too much out of the box but they also have an excellent and helpful community and documentation if you run into trouble or don’t know how to do something. Just… you have to be willing to deal with that kinda stuff, and not everyone is (I’m certainly not).

    kixik , (edited )

    One thing I don’t know about any Arch based distributions is how about configurations. On Arch, the default configurations for some packages, whether do not work out of the box, or are not the safest configs. Whether while installing new SW, or while updating, there’s a good level of involvement particularly with configurations.

    Apart from installation, which in rolling release distributions it might be about a one time thing per device, configuration might become a burden for new users.

    I believe Manjaro (I’ve never used it) comes with some sort of sane configs that work out of the box for most users, unless when looking for particular tweaks, or so I read in the past. But Manjaro has fallen really down on people’s preferences. If EndeavourOS uses Arch repos, I’m wondering if there’s any difference, once installed, between maintaining Arch and maintaining EndeavourOS. Just by how it sounds, it’s the same thing, a lot of wikies readings (particularly when not familiar with the SW and how to make it work, there’s SW that works without particular configs, but there are some that don’t really work nicely out of the box on Arch), having to config lots of things to install stuff and make it work, and then be careful on upgrades about configs changes. It doesn’t look like EndeavourOS makes this any simpler, and just having some extra stuff, but not having their own repos, where they package SW with curated configs, then I see no purpose other than to make the Arch install easier, which now a days have alternative ways to do so.

    Can some one please clarify on configs, and maintenance in general, for EndeavourOS? Is there an Arch based distribution really making this easier on new gnu+linux users, who are are really not used to deal with any of that? TBH, depending on Arch packages repositories sounds hard to achieve any of that…

    LeFantome ,

    “ Can some one please clarify on configs, and maintenance in general, for EndeavourOS?”

    EndeavourOS is Arch with a nice installer and decent default configs. It is super easy to get to a nice, fully configured desktop. Once installed, it is basically Arch Linux.

    kixik ,

    Yeah, I was afraid so… I’m OK with Arch, and I actually use Artix (to avoid systemd), but I know there are people who don’t want, neither can do configs, nor maintain them on upgrades, as it’s a typical thing on Arch, and most distros based on it… So I’m afraid there’s really no Arch based distribution for those kind of users, and EndeavourOS seems no exception. Actually if one really wants typical Arch after installation, there are alternatives to the Arch ISO, no need for other distribution for that I’d suggest…

    It’d be nice to have an Arch based distribution equivalent to Mint, so maintenance is really minimal on new users, and users with no tech abilities. Something rolling release is actually something welcome for such users, since having to upgrade on major versions is not always as clean, even for people with some experience.

    At any rate, thanks for the clarification.

    Molecular0079 ,

    It’s a solid choice for a lot of the reasons you mentioned. I used it for a long time before switching over to regular Arch and I still use it as a live USB to recover my Arch install or to rollback to an older BTRFS snapshot.

    I will say though that it is sorta barebones enough it essentially becomes a gateway drug to regular Arch. If you’re curious, you might want to check out the official archinstall installer that’s bundled with the official Arch iso. It really makes it quite easy to get a working Arch install up and running.

    NathanUp ,
    @NathanUp@lemmy.ml avatar

    What made you decide to switch to vanilla arch?

    Molecular0079 ,

    Two reasons actually:

    1. After getting really familiar with EndeavourOS, I was just curious about how hard an actual Arch install was. Then I found out about the official archinstall tool bundled in the ISO, decided to try it out, and it gave me a relatively barebones KDE desktop that was super snappy and that I could expand however I wanted. It just felt nice so I decided to stick with it. Now I am so used to using archinstall on my many Arch deployments (desktop, DIY NAS, home theater PC, work laptop, Surface Pro 7) that it really just feels like home.
    2. After Antergos shut down, I briefly used Anarchy installer. When that also shutdown, I became a bit wary about the longevity of these smaller community-driven Arch-derivatives. I don’t have anything against them and it’s super cool that these projects exist to expand the appeal of Arch to more users, but personally I wanted to be familiar with something that I knew would exist for a really long time and wouldn’t close down due to the developers getting too tired of doing maintenance, which is a very real thing in FOSS. I am constantly getting new devices and installing Arch on them, so finding a more permanent solution that I knew was always going to be there was important to me.
    NathanUp ,
    @NathanUp@lemmy.ml avatar

    Good reasons! Thanks!

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