We are proud to announce our second release of 2021 and this one is a bit more than a refresh ISO release, so before you hit the download button and go play with it, just sit back and let us inform you first because we are really excited about this release.
Discovery
We already covered our websites receiving a new look but in this case, I want to put the spotlight on our wiki. Our Discovery magazine has been discontinued due to a lack of writers and it now has been rebooted as the EndeavourOS knowledge base for both x86_64 and ARM. The contributions our Discovery writer Moses Narrow wrote are still available under Articles.
The other new feature on the knowledge base are video tutorials, like the wiki articles, this category will expand over time and at the moment it contains general Linux and Arch specific tutorials from the Youtube channels Chris Titus Tech and EF Linux. Very soon videos from DistroTube, Eric Adams and TechHut will also be added to enhance the experience.
We want to thank Chris Titus, Eric Adams, Derek Taylor, Ermanno Ferrari and Techhut for giving us their consent to share their videos on Discovery.
You can visit our renewed wiki over here: https://discovery.endeavouros.com
Two new mirrors
Since our last release, we have gained two new mirrors on our network. The Easylee mirror that is located in The Netherlands, kindly provided by an Arch enthusiast and a Canadian mirror provided by our community member Freebird54. Due to an upstream bug downloading a full ISO will need a manual restart after 1 GB has been downloaded. Also, until now downloads (full ISO) outside Canada have been reported as slow. Downloading package updates from the repo are handled as quickly as the other mirrors. For Canadian users, however, this mirror is a welcome addition with a more than acceptable performance.
ARM
The development of EndeavourOS ARM is at an exciting stage at this moment. Pudge is testing new developments by jgmdev, tobetter and Jonathon to run Linux kernel 5.11 and Wayland on the Odroid N2. The results look very promising but it needs a bit more testing.
Pudge is also working with community members Shjim and Lxn to improve the installation process on the PineBook Pro. Both developments are in an advanced stage and we will release an announcement on this very, very soon.
Deepin
Deepin has been an option since our first ISO that shipped the net installer in December 2019. Since version 20 was released, Deepin was far from a smooth ride on Arch and we kept shipping it because we were convinced a more improved and stable performance was going to hit the Arch repo eventually. After months of monitoring and waiting the improvement on performance didn’t arrive, so we decided not to offer Deepin as one of our DE options on the online installer anymore.
The April release
Before I go into the two exciting new editions this release is shipping, I start with the usual updates we provide with every refresh release.
The live environment and the Xfce offline edition are shipping:
- Calamares 3.2.39.3-2
- Firefox 87.0-2
- Linux kernel 5.11.14-arch-1-1
- Mesa 21.0.2-1
- nvidia-dkms 465.24.02-1
Improvements:
- Auto-login – Bugfix on DE not opening when chosen auto-login during installation on Calamares.
- Send logs to Pastebin – Calamares is now shipping with a send logs to Pastebin feature, making tracking down the cause of a failed installation easier for us, once posted on our community platforms.
- Nvidia – Improvements for Nvidia hardware boot for both the Live ISO and installed systems, addressing the issue of the Nvidia driver not kicking in after GRUB had started.
- yad-eos – The window size issue on our EOS tools has been addressed by shipping a forked and improved YAD version, the package our tools are based on, in our repo is called yad-eos.
- Update button – The update button for our Welcome app has been removed from the Live environment since it isn’t necessary to update the tool itself and ultimately was causing the welcome app not to appear back after the update button was clicked, making an installation impossible.
- Virtualbox oracle extension – The Oracle extensions pack, needed to enable the USB function on Virtualbox, has been added to our repo. (not installed by default)
- Reflector-simple – Reflector simple on the Welcome app is now showing a progress window when ranking the mirrors.
- Clean-up – A thorough clean-up of our packages to keep our ISO under 2GB.
New features on the Welcome app:
- Pacdiff – An essential tool to manage changes in system and package configuration files. Welcome’s Pacdiff button starts Pacdiff with the support of a GUI tool that makes viewing and merging changes easy.
- Software news – A new button that informs the user of important workarounds or solutions for bugs, changes or manual interventions. This feature is specially made for our users that don’t visit our community platforms frequently.
- Download more EndeavourOS wallpapers – This button downloads the classic wallpapers that we used as our default in previous releases and a selection of community-made wallpapers, with additions or changes each release.
- Choose one of the EndeavourOS wallpapers – lets you choose the wallpapers and display it on the desktop with a few simple clicks.
BSPWM and Sway
After months of talking and teasing, we are proud to announce two other community editions, ARM being the first, the tiling window managers BSPWM and Sway.
BSPWM is a tiling window manager that is based on Xorg and Sway being the i3-wm replacement running on Wayland. Both editions are customized by our community members with an EndeavourOS touch and can run independently or on top of a DE. The ones shipped on the ISO are not based on a specific DE to keep them lightweight.
These editions wouldn’t be made possible without the hard work and input from our community members:
BSPWM – Penguin1, Ramblinwreck, Elloquin, UbikOne, Odiouslmp, Shjim, Xircon, Pudge and Flyingcakes
Sway – Odiouslmp, Ringo, Morten-b, Shjim and Elloquin.
Sway and virtual machines warning
If you are curious to try out Sway on a virtual machine be aware that this won’t work out of the box on most virtual machines because Wayland isn’t supported on them. There have been successes with installing the Zen kernel on your virtual machine but we advise you to visit our forum and ask the community for help if you plan to do so.
Community editions
We now have created a Github page to make future community editions a bit more insightful and easier to implement. If you have an idea for another community edition, just contact us on the forum and try to involve as many community members like you to realize that idea. You can take look at our page over here:
https://github.com/EndeavourOS-Community-Editions
We hope you are as pleased about this release as we are, you can download the ISO over here.
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