It’s December and this means 2019 is nearing its end. For us, 2019 has been a remarkable year, not in our wildest dreams had either of us dreamt that we would be in this position.
The road was and still is rocky, neither of us had any previous experience in developing and maintaining a distro, so when Antergos ended their run we dove as four rookies into the deep Linux Ocean and despite the challenges, we still don’t regret this decision.
The purpose of this post is to give you an insight of what we’re planning to bring to EndeavourOS. This means that not all plans are going to be realised as a perfectly executed feature in 2020, for some of the plans it’s just the realisation of the groundwork.
It is also a testimony that we’re still alive and kicking.
Before I go on to reveal to you what’s coming, I want to make one thing clear.
We are not the Antergos successor
EndeavourOS departed from Antergos and the community members that followed us from Antergos were the members that ran Antergos almost the full Archlinux way and some of them even gave workarounds to avoid the bugs that were plaguing Antergos in its last months of existence.
EndeavourOS was created with those community members in mind, we never created this distro to be the Antergos successor, therefore this distro isn’t aiming at Linux newbies or people who are looking for a slick looking and running Arch alternative. We are aiming at the Linux users who want a soft landing in Archlinux and like to get their hands dirty for the fun of it and not because they’re power users.
If you’re looking for the true Antergos successor, we recommend RebornOS.
Website
The website will get a translated version in several languages with a link to the designated language area on the forum. The languages, for now, that will receive a designated website are: French, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Russian and German.
If you want to help us in translating in your language, please contact me through the contact form of our website or send me a PM on the forum. (We’re in need of Spanish and Portuguese translators since some of those translators left the project )
Discovery
We recently released the Discovery magazine in which I inform you of the recent news, app spotlights and articles. Moses Narrow joined two weeks ago as a writer to help to feed Discovery with articles.
For 2020 Discovery will also going to feature vlogs to enhance some of the articles and it shall contain also instructional videos.
If you’d like to join the Discovery team, please contact me through the contact form or send me a PM on the forum.
Two monthly release
Time management is still an issue in the team, to keep the distro still rolling without losing our sanity and cause havoc in our day to to day lives, we decided to go for a two monthly release, instead of the current monthly release.
EndeavourOS welcome as the key feature
Manuel created eos-welcome and in the wake of it the eos-update-notifier, two lightweight apps that can run on any Desktop Environment and since they are developed in-house, we are more able to react on upstream system changes that might break the apps.
Both apps have been released very recently and made already giant leaps in development. It may not come as a surprise to you that eos-welcome is going to be our key feature, certainly, when the net-installer has launched, it is going to play a vital role in the live environment as in the installed system straight after install.
Net-installer
Yes, I can’t write a post about our future plans without including the hottest subject since launch. One thing we’ve learned recently, the net-installer is a subject that stirs up the emotions, inside as outside the community.
We are using the Calamares installer to let you choose between the offline or online installer.
At the moment we made a lot of progress on the net-installer but we still have a lot of things to sort out, therefore we still can’t give you an exact date for an Alpha or Beta release.
Other goals
I gave you the main features you can expect from us in the near future, other features further down the line are: Hardware detection, Wifi password remembered after install and other features.
Learning on the job
We know that EndeavourOS has its rough edges and as you can see we are working with full enthusiasm and passion to smoothen those edges.
Thanks to my fellow founders of EndeavourOS, this excellent community has an OS to fall back on and no matter what other people might say about our current state of the distro, for guys who are learning on the job, you have created a product to be proud of.
December release
A couple of days ago we released an interim release, this month we will push out a proper December release, just keep an eye out on our announcements.