November 15th is nearing and we know all of you are looking forward to this release.
Between our previous announcement and this one, a lot has happened behind the scenes which have its effects on the launch of the net-installer.
We have been working very hard on the net-installer and already we received enthusiastic feedback from the Moderators who are performing the test runs.
In our previous announcement, we stated that the net-installer would be released in stages. Due to Fernando’s and Joe’s work commitment the upcoming months, they can’t contribute the same amount of work they previously put into EndeavourOS.
This, however, has no disastrous effects for us as a team and for the distro. Right from the beginning, we always made it clear to the community and to each other that our private lives and work commitments come first and that EndeavourOS is a fun hobby on the side.
Luckily Fernando’s and Joe’s work reached further than the monthly release, so the net-installer is running very reliable but feedback is welcome at any point. The feature that will be affected by this, is the theming of the DE’s.
Since Joe is in charge of the theming of the DE’s and recently I started helping him next to my other tasks for the distro, we decided to release each DE theme when they are ready, so keep an eye on every monthly release if your favourite DE theme package hit the repo.
So what are we going to release on the 15th? Well, the answer is simple: We’re going to release a Net-installer that installs a close to vanilla Base, Gnome, Budgie, Deepin, Plasma, Mate, Cinnamon, Lxqt and Xfce with the DE themes that are ready at that time.
No, it isn’t a typo we’re releasing all the main DE’s all at once, so the focus lies on the net-installer at first release rather than theme. Like I said earlier, we rely on feedback on this release, especially from newer hardware users. Unfortunately, none of the Moderators and we don’t own the latest and greatest.
We’re also open to receiving feedback on the DE’s itself, an important note though, we are not going to implement AUR packages in our repo, so check the desired packages first before submitting the idea.
For the definition of almost vanilla, I refer to the previous article. We also decided to ship a Base package that differs from the one Arch offers. Our Base package will include Nano, networking, Firefox, Grub and the mainstream Linux kernel. I know there’s a user-base out there that would like to see us doing this differently, but to avoid dissapointment this is the road we chose to travel. EndeavourOS is close to Arch and not pure Arch.
Needless to say that the current offline installer will still be available and updated each release.
We’re very excited to release the net-installer and we hope you join us on this exciting journey to the next level on 15 November 2019.
