Our fifth anniversary, the return of ARM and the Endeavour release with Plasma 6.1 is here

It has been five years since four former Antergos moderators took the plunge into creating a distro without any knowledge or experience at all. Creating EndeavourOS was a true endeavour for us, conquering mountains and deep valleys of code paired with frustration and failure and at times we were on the verge of dropping the idea in an instant.

It is somewhat of a miracle that I’m able to run an Arch-based distro through a terminal, certainly back then. So, you can imagine how many tantrums I’ve thrown out to poor Joekamprad, Manuel and Fernandomaroto in setting up a server, creating a website and setting up the forum, whilst they did the real heavy lifting in creating our very first ISO. Luckily, their perseverance and calmness had a positive effect on me, so I reduced the amount of smashing my head against the wall, picked up my ThinkPad that I threw through the room from the floor and began reading before executing. (Not much changed, frankly…)

In hindsight, we all were nervous at that time but we had some powerful engines thrusting us forward comparable to the Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce or Saab engines that power any Airbus, Boeing or military aircraft out there… YOU, the community!

From the start, we created this distro with our enthusiastic community at its core and that brought us where we are today. We came a long way from a single offline installer for Xfce to an installer with an offline installer for KDE Plasma and an online installer with eight desktop environments and one Window manager to choose from. But most importantly, it was our community, aka Endeavournauts, that formed our identity. Without your support and input, we couldn’t have made the journey during its first year, let alone five!

We, Dalto, Fernandomaroto, Joekamprad, Manuel, Pudge and I, would like to thank all of our past and current contributors, our moderators, our financial contributors, our mirror providers and all the Endeavournauts out there for the incredible ride the past five years… But the journey continues and we hope you’ll stick with us to make some more memories.

The return of ARM

Image created by Rockwallaby

In April we announced that we were saying goodbye to our ARM developer Pudge and in the wake of it the EndeavourOS ARM support, since he was our sole developer for ARM.

Well, during this short hiatus, Pudge had some rest and a change of heart about leaving the ARM project. This hiatus also gave him the chance to look at some issues from a different angle and he threw the entire ARM install he created with Sradjoker overboard and returned to the essence EndeavourOS ARM once was.

Previously, RPi 4b, RPi 5b, Odroid N2 and PineBook Pro users could either use the main ISO through Calamares or use an install script to install EndeavourOS ARM. To simplify the maintenance of the ARM project, he dropped the Calamares method and took the install scripts as a starting point to reinvent the project.

With user-friendliness in the back of his mind, Pudge developed downloadable images for each device and those are:

• Raspberry Pi 4b
• Raspberry Pi 5b
• Odroid N2
• Pinebook Pro
• RPI 4b & 5b headless server installation

Each image will install the system in an easy, clean and automatic way on a storage device. For more installation details go to our EndeavourOS ARM install page.

We are following the upcoming support for the Snapdragon X Elite for Linux and when it is there, our goal is to add it to our supported hardware. Also, we are still looking for Mac M1, M2, M3 and ThinkPad or other major brand owners with ARM architecture who want to collaborate with us to create install images for those. You can contact us through our socials, forum or email.

The Endeavour release

Wallpaper by UncleSpellbinder

To mark our fifth anniversary and coming full circle, we gave this release the one-off codename Endeavour, the one Space Shuttle name we avoided using, besides Discovery (our wiki already carries that name), Challenger and Columbia (out of respect). This means that Endeavour will not have a Neo or Nova release but will be followed by another major release name. This release carries the usual upstream changes as with our other releases.

• Calamares 24.06.1.2-1
• Firefox 127.0.1-1
• Kernel 6.9.6.arch1-1
• Mesa 1:24.1.2-1
• Xorg-server 21.1.13-1 (xorg)
• Nvidia 550.90.07-4
• Plasma 6.1 for both the Live Environment as the offline install option

Fixes

• Installation doesn’t crash anymore when the EOS apps are deselected in Calamares

• Fixed language selection for Italian users for vconsole

• The r8168 legacy driver package is removed from our default installation options due to removal from the Arch repo. Most legacy Realtek hardware will run with the Realtek drivers provided by the Linux kernel. In some cases, a workaround is needed described in this thread post.

Unresolved issue

In the case of installing EndeavourOS on older hardware using legacy BIOS with the manual install option chosen, GRUB doesn’t get installed. The workaround for this is to create an empty 8 MiB partition and flag it as BIOS-GRUB in the Calamares installer (See images below) using a GPT partition table instead of MBR. This way the bootloader will get installed as a grub2core image on that partition.

This release doesn’t affect running systems, if you regularly have updated your system, the core updates are already there. The fixes described in this announcement are improvements for the ISO and the installation process.

You can download the Endeavour ISO over here.