When the popular Arch-based distro Antergos ended its run in May 2019, it left a friendly and extremely helpful community behind. Within a matter of days after the announcement, Bryan Poerwoatmodjo opted for the idea to continue the community feeling on a new forum that would invite any Arch or Arch-based Linux user into the group. The idea received a lot of enthusiastic response, more than enough for him to get the project going.
Quickly, Johannes Kamprad, Fernando Omiechuk Frozi and Manuel joined him to set up the project and when that happened, the plan changed from preserving the former community on a new forum to creating a new distro with that vibrant community at its core.
With the plan to turn Endeavour into EndeavourOS, we deliberately travelled another road than Antergos did. It never was and it will never be our intention to be an Antergos clone. In fact, our departure point was the Antergos community and not Antergos the distro and that’s why we chose to let go of the look and feel of our predecessor and find our own voice in creating our own identity with the community at our side.
To avoid the project becoming unmanageable, we decided in the early stage of development to provide a basic system that is close to Arch Linux. That’s why we are aiming for a Linux user with an intermediate level of knowledge who likes to handle a system that needs hands-on customization from the get-go, with the help of our main standout feature: Our vibrant and friendly community.
This resulted in a distro that is lightweight and ships with a minimum amount of preinstalled apps. An almost blank canvas ready to personalize.
Our first release only shipped an offline installer with our customized Xfce desktop environment and in December of that same year, the addition of the online installer on the ISO was launched.
After the launch of the online installer, community member Pudge challenged himself to get EndeavourOS working on an ARM device. Initially, it was meant to be an article for the now discontinued Discovery magazine but we approached Pudge to turn it into an official community-driven release.
Notable releases
| 23 June 2019 | The EndeavourOS website launched |
| 02 July 2019 | Launch of the forum |
| 15 July 2019 | First offline stable release with the customized Xfce Desktop Environment |
| 02 November 2019 | Discovery magazine was launched |
| 22 December 2019 | Our first mirror, Alpix, became available |
| 23 December 2019 | The first ISO with the combined offline and online installer was launched |
| 19 September 2020 | The launch of EndeavourOS ARM |
| 03 April 2021 | Discovery magazine discontinued and became the EndeavourOS knowledge base. (wiki) |
| 17 April 2021 | BSPWM and Sway community editions were added to the installer |
| 27 August 2021 | The redesigned ISO-Next was launched with an improved and faster installation time. |
| 03 December 2021 | Atlantis 21.4 release, the first release with a code name inspired by spacecraft names, followed by the year and number of the release. Also, the first release introduced with HotFix tool for the devs to send patches to a released ISO. |
| 17 December 2021 | Atlantis Neo release, the first intermediate ISO release carrying the name followed by the addition neo. This release also introduced the community editions of Openbox and Qtile. |
| 8 April 2022 | Apollo was released introducing a brand new EndeavourOS exclusive Window Manager Worm, developed by community editions developer Codic12. |
| 24 June 2022 | Artemis was released shipping an integrated semi-automatic installation for ARM using Calamares. This version supported Odroid and the Raspberry Pi. It was the first major improvement made by main developer Sradjoker for EndeavourOS ARM since its launch in September 2020. |
| 19 December 2022 | Cassini was released, the first release with options to let the user choose three bootloader options, no bootloader, systemd-boot or Grub. It was also the first release with Dracut being installed by default instead of mkinitcpio. ARM added official support for the Pinebook Pro. |
| 11 February 2023 | Cassini Neo the intermediate ISO update with bugfixes for the latest Intel/ARC machines and more has arrived. |
| 8 March 2023 | Cassini Nova with minor but necessary bug fixes and also with the usual refreshed main package versions for both the live environment was released. |
| 30 March 2023 | Cassini Nova R1 (first rebuild) we silently released a rebuilt Cassini Nova ISO called Cassini Nova R1. |
| 5 June 2023 | Cassini Nova R2 was released to bridge the timeline for the upcoming Galileo release. |
| 20 November 2023 | Cassini Nova R1 (first rebuild) We silently released a rebuilt Cassini Nova ISO called Cassini Nova R1. |
| 27 January 2024 | Release of Galileo Neo Kernel 6.7.1, and some Plasma offline and Calamares fixes. |
| 8 April 2024 | Galileo was released, with a focus on keeping EndeavourOS rolling by streamlining the workflow for the team. KDE Plasma replaced Xfce as the Live environment and on the offline install option. The community editions were dropped as an option in the installer. EndeavourOS ARM added the Raspberry Pi 5b and the Radxa ROCK 5b to the supported devices list. |
| 23 April 2024 | Gemini was released Gemini was the first release using Qt 6 and the first release without ARM install images. |
| 30 June 2024 | Endeavour was released marking the fifth anniversary and the return of ARM support through separate downloadable images. |
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