Grab a mug of coffee or tea, find a comfy chair and sit back, because we have a lot to tell you. So with no further ado, I start by saying:
Hello and welcome, come and meet EndeavourOS!
No, I didn’t lose my mind. I know we’ve launched on 15 July, but a lot of people out there don’t know what we’re standing for and now we’re entering the next stage, I think a proper re-introduction would be in place. This next stage will also give EndeavourOS a more defined identity.
EndeavourOS aims at the group of distro-hoppers that are looking for a new challenge in their Linux experience by getting their feet wet, ready to get some elbow grease with Archlinux in a friendly environment. We also aim at the group of people who are familiar with Archlinux but want quick and easy access to Arch without having to remove a lot of software they don’t need.
Bring back Antergos
When EndeavourOS was presented as a plan, we immediately got marked as the Antergos successor. Even though we’ve made it clear from the start that we were not going to walk the same path as Antergos did, despite our articles and other explanations on this, that mark haunts us to this day.
The first goal was to house the existing former Antergos community to another platform. Since this community was already familiar with the most important terminal commands to run an Arch-based system but didn’t want to lose the friendly community bond that was build up through the years.
It was and will never be our vision to offer a feature-rich and an out of the box experience.
Instead, we offer you the opportunity to create a system that is tailored to your needs with a friendly and helpful community behind you, along with some tools to get familiar with the terminal and the system.
Pamac
We deliberately chose to ship the AUR helper Yay over the popular GUI installer Pamac. Yay is a powerful tool and it gives the user a better understanding of what they are installing on their system. It also doesn’t require any tweaking from us to run it on any desktop environment, so one of the most important tools in our system isn’t affected by any desktop environment updates.
We will never discourage or judge you for installing such GUI installers or even Snaps or Flatpak. Like I already wrote, you’re free to customize the system to your liking and if you run into a problem with either one of those solutions, don’t hesitate to ask the community for help.
Discovery
In a previous post, we announced that we’re going to launch the Discovery magazine that gives you a better insight of Arch commands and puts the spotlight on some packages and apps.
The original plan was to present this magazine as a downloadable file in a magazine-like layout with a quarterly release.
To be honest, I struggled working it out because so many ideas related to this plan started popping up in my head. So I reorganised my ideas and came up with the following plan, it isn’t just going to be a magazine but a powerful information tool to enhance the EndeavourOS experience.
Discovery, Explore your Endeavour
To empower the idea of it being a powerful information tool, Discovery is going to be presented as an online platform that will be refreshed with new articles on Linux news, a deeper insight on Arch commands, spotlights on a variety of apps, packages and games, anything to enrich your EndeavourOS experience.
Community highlight platform
Discovery is also going to give you the opportunity to present your contribution to share with the community. These contributions can vary from a workaround in a desktop environment, a game or a tool/script you’ve created or an article you want to write on your experience on us, Linux and tech in general. Don’t let your writing- and/or English skills stop you from contributing, your article will be edited by a small team from the community.
Wiki versus Discovery
The wiki will contain articles in relation to the Arch repo and Discovery will cover solutions from the AUR and community created workarounds or scripts.
Discovery will go live on:
1 November 2019
We will give you the details on how to submit an article after the website is launched, this way you’ve got a better feel on what the platform is all about.
Net-installer
Like our offline installer, we are using Calamares as the net-installer also. The advantage for us is that we are able to present one ISO that houses one installer for both options.
Within the installer, you will have two options to choose from, the current offline installer that installs Xfce and the net-installer where you can choose a desktop environment you wish to install.
Desktop configuration
All desktop environments will ship with
- EndeavourOS grub menu
- Leafpad
- Nvidia-installer-dkms
- Gtop
- Gparted
- Firefox
- Yay
- Nano
- Transmission
- Broadcom-wl-dkms
- EndeavourOS Welcome
Post-install
After the installation process, the system will boot up with the desktop environment of your choice with a vanilla look, ready to configure to your liking.
To make it a little bit more convenient, you’ll be greeted with the Welcome menu with links to:
- Initialise mirroring
- Checking for updates
- The package management wiki article
- Hardware related wiki articles
- The Yay wiki article
- Useful forum tool link
It also gives you the option to install some basic packages from the Arch repo with a single click like:
- Gufw (Firewall)
- LibreOffice
- Chromium
- Update notifier
- Bluetooth
EndeavourOS theming
For those who like our theme, don’t worry, we also thought of you. Each desktop environment will have the option in the menu to install our theme with a simple click.
This way we cater to both users who desire an almost vanilla desktop and the ones who want a themed desktop in a clean and simple way.
Desktop environments
As you can imagine, this is a pretty ambitious operation and to execute this the right way we’re going to release the net-installer in three stages.
First release (first stage)
Xfce, Plasma, Cinnamon, Mate and Base.
Second release (second stage)
Gnome, Budgie, Deepin and Lxqt.
Third release (final stage)
Openbox and i3-wm.
The first release will be available on:
15 November 2019
Keep an eye out on our channels because the upcoming weeks we will provide you with more news on the net-installer.