Development in full throttle

Although it is Summer over here, we do have exciting news to share with you surrounding our development of the next release and also some mirror updates. So without further ado let’s go straight to business…

Mirrors

In our previous article, we informed you we removed the Indian mirror Ghead due to technical issues. Unfortunately, we still haven’t received any updates on the progress of the issues and we will inform you as soon as we received any news from the mirror admin. For our Indian community, we recommend using the Freedif mirror located in Vietnam as the nearest server or the Tuna mirror in China.

The Dutch mirror admin for Easylee announced that the content moved to a new server, also located in The Netherlands with a whopping 10Gbit connection, widening the reach of this server. The server also is an Arch mirror and is called https://mirror.erickochen.nl, so those who want to rank it on top can use it also for the mainstream Arch updates. If your system is up-to-date and you have run eos-pacdiff, the mirror has already replaced the Easylee mirror in etc/pacman.d/endeavouros-mirrorlist .

If you’d looked in that script, you also noticed we gained another German mirror https://mirror.moson.org, thanks to our community member @moson. Thank you for offering us space on your server and improving our user experience with that.

The upcoming release

The development of our upcoming release is in full swing and is at a very exciting stage at this moment.

I already informed you that Joe and Manuel are working very hard on a redesigned ISO. What they actually did was tearing down the existing ISO with Calamares along their way and started from scratch to clean up the way the ISO is working.

By doing this, Joe and Manuel together with the help from the community and the Calamares community, are able to create an ISO specifically for our use case. As you can understand, this process is an elaborate job that takes a lot of figuring out, endless trial and errors and mostly a lot of time. They meticulously are putting each and every process Calamares handles one at a time, to improve the user experience.

Well, this blog post is here to announce that the fruits of their labour are showing off. One of our most critiqued issues is the installation time and in some cases, it even takes over an hour to complete the installation. Test runs now have shown that the new install time takes between a whopping six and fifteen minutes, depending on the internet speed. There are rare cases that even clocked three minutes but this was achieved with a very high internet connection speed.

For the upcoming release, our goal is also to improve the BTRFS installation with Calamares and development on that is in a promising stage.

Although we still have a lot of work to do to present this ISO to the public, we are already extremely proud of this upcoming release. At this moment we don’t recommend giving the dev ISO a try, since Joe and Manuel are adding features in stages. The current ISOs are truly trial and error releases that are missing some important features to install a decent running system.

We are aware that our current April release is showing its age, especially for those who are running newer hardware. Please be patient, the next release is coming soon.

I’m planning to frequently keep you up-to-date on the development of the new ISO with blog posts like these, so keep an eye on the website, forum and social media channels.

Last but not least, I want to give a very special shoutout to the Moderators and community members who are helping us in the development of this ISO. Thank you so much for this. And a lot of love and deep, deep, very deep respect to @joekamprad and @manuel!!! I’ve said it before but you are the true heart and heroes of EndeavourOS!!!!

This is it for now, but you will hear from us very, very soon,

Love,

Lois Lane…