The April release has arrived

We’re proud to present you our latest release and it is chucked with new features and improvements, so without further ado, let’s dive in…

Universal ISO boot

Our previous ISO versions couldn’t boot on systems that ship with a newer dedicated Nvidia graphics card. This release comes with the option to boot the ISO with the Open-source drivers or the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

The latter choice is only for dedicated newer NVIDIA graphic cards, legacy card and OPTIMUS hybrid system (Intel + NVIDIA) users should choose the default choice.

Calamares

Florent Valetti (FLVAL), in cooperation with Fernando Omiechuk Frozi (fernandomaroto) for technical assistance, has changed the look and feel of Calamares in comparison with the December release.

Not only did he change the main colour, from purple to blue, he also made an overall clean-up and has added small details in the installer, to give it a unique EndeavourOS signature.

The installer now launches with a terminal window in the background to keep the user informed on the progress of the installation. This is to avoid users to prematurely quit the install process, due to the progress bar in Calamares not showing any sign of movement at certain points of the install.

Partitioning with Calamares has been improved and works now almost 100%. There are some cases known where the auto partitioning fails, in that case, the Live Environment still ships Gparted as a fallback solution, also LUKS encryption is now possible from the Calamares installer.

Mirror

In cooperation with Alpix, we finally have our own mirror for the EndeavourOS repo and in this release, the mirror will be installed as the first choice by default, next to the existing Github mirror.

Running systems can simply be altered by using the welcome app. It is not a must to use our mirror, the current Github mirror will still be available since our network of mirrors isn’t that large.

If you want to provide your server to serve as a mirror for us, instructions will follow very soon, otherwise, you can also contact us for further details through our social media channels and the forum.

Vanilla theming

For the online installer, all the Desktop Environments will be installed vanilla themed. The reactions on the vanilla themed DEs were so enthusiastic, that we’ve decided to drop the development of themed DEs.

The offline installer will still be installing our themed XFCE as experienced in our Live Environment, especially for the fans who do like it.

If an offline install user wants a vanilla XFCE afterwards, we provided a button on the welcome app to remove it in a heartbeat.

Welcome app

Our welcome app is multi-lingual now and besides English, it supports Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Finnish, Slovakian, Romanian, Polish and French.

New in-house developed apps

Manuel has created some new apps and tools to make the EndeavourOS experience a bit smoother.

• Pahis – A tool that shows the package history in the terminal.
• Eos-log-tool – A GUI app to create a log file needed when reporting a bug on the forum or the bug report area.
• Eos-rankmirrors – Ranks (only) Endeavour mirrors. Arch mirrors can be ranked e.g. the reflector-simple app. After ranking (Arch and Endeavour mirrors), the user should have the best mirrors at their disposal.

The existing EndeavourOS apps have received some bugfixes and they all transitioned to ZSTD.

Multi-boot

We’ve addressed the multi-boot problem with grub that has affected most Arch-based distros which is an upstream issue, the fix concerns two separate packages: grub and os-prober. Now all distros should be bootable by EndeavourOS grub.

i3-wm

Joe Kamprad (Joekamprad) has worked on an i3-wm set-up to give beginners and advanced users a jumpstart to the popular Window Manager. It is not based on a Desktop Environment but uses LXappearance to let the window manager handle GTK themes easier. Therefore it is light and simple, exactly what EndeavourOS stands for.

Normally, i3-wm doesn’t respond on mouse- or touchpad clicks, due to its keyboard-centric nature. Joe has made it possible that two items in the taskbar are clickable, the first one will open a text-editor (Leafpad) with the keyboard shortcuts on it and the second one opens a cheat sheet with the main configs to edit i3-wm, just to make your jumpstart easier.

In addition, we’ve also updated the wiki for this popular Window Manager too.

Other features and updates

• Linux kernel 5.6.3-arch1-1
• Firefox 75.0 -1
• Mesa 20.0.4-1
• Calamares 3.2.20
• Automatic update to the NVIDIA database for the NVIDIA-installer
• Fixes and enhancements for the EOS package build tools.
• In the last phase of the installation, a clean-up of unnecessary drivers will be performed, for a cleaner experience from the first boot.
• VM-Ware support included on the ISO
• An Easter egg for XFCE terminal users. (also for running systems)

We hope you’re as enthusiastic about this release as we are and that we have satisfied the long wait…

Enjoy your new Endeavour!!!

You can download the ISO over here.