The September release and EndeavourOS ARM arrived

I have to say that the development of the two releases we are presenting today was an intense experience and almost felt like we were relaunching EndeavourOS.

Now that we’re talking, I want to thank the community and our financial backers for the rock solid support you are giving us in times of trouble. Thank you for having your backs during the good and the hard times we are facing in the world and in our community. Your love and support is our engine and you are providing us one that is equal to a Rolls Royce, you are really incredible.

Okay, that was it for the chit-chat and I’m going to cut to the chase right now, because we are extremely proud of what we are presenting you.

The September release

Even though this release may look like a run through the mill release for the average user, it is packed with a a lot of fixes and improvements under the hood, making it the biggest release since the net-installer.

Besides the usual updates like kernel 5.8.10 and Firefox 80.0.1-, this release ships with the folowing fixes and implementations.

The Welcome app

The Welcome app has received major updates:

• Received Chinese translations (A big shoutout to Felixonmars for this)
• New button to change display resolutions – This function is only available in the Live environment, especially for virtual machine installs.
• The button Update mirrors now ships with a check if reflector-simple is installed.
• Two link buttons that each brings the user to the Arch repo page or the AUR page to browse for packages.
• An Archlinux ARM button link.
• Buttons that adds our DE specific wallpaper by default, so no more pop-up that asks for permission anymore.
• A new button to select one of our wallpapers. (This function will receive an update to select community made wallpapers in the near future)
• Various bugfixes

Installation

The installation process received some major updates:

• The new archiso is implemented
• Keychain server bug is fixed
• Nvidia-installer has been updated to the latest Nvidia updates and changes. It also received some small bugfixes.
• Gnome software will not be installed by default on Gnome and Budgie, it brought too much confusion with new users thinking it was our software centre.
• Discover will not be installed by default on Plasma for the same reason as above.
• eos-update-notifier doesn’t show Arch news by default anymore, it was causing a lot of confusion with new users who received outdated manual interventions. It also received a bugfix in showing AUR updates.
• eos-update-notifier has a redesigned scheduler which now can be set to hourly, daily, weekly and monthly with a GUI.
• Bugfix for people who enabled auto login not able to get into the DE.
• Deepin autologin is also fixed
• Calamares has some new slides

i3-WM

• The panel now has cllickable areas for browser, terminal and filemanager to make it more newbie friendly.
• Keybindings hint button now uses xed.
• Block button for a mailclient has been added, ready for the user to configure it to the mailclient of their choice.

This release is shipping with new wallpapers, existing users can get them with the wallpaper buttons on the Welcome app. The wallpapers were created by Florent Valetti, our visual designer, using Evolvotron, which is maintained in the AUR by community member Saverio, Grazie bene!

EndeavourOS ARM

The much-anticipated release has finally arrived, EndeavourOS ARM, created by lead developer Pudge in cooperation with Alen Bašić, Johannes Kamprad, Manuel, Fernando Omichuck Frozie and Florent Valetti.

Our ARM branch is fully based on Archlinux ARM and some people were wondering about our support to them. Well, there is a donation of 100 EURO on its way to the incredible team that made our branch possible. Also some of you might have noticed that we are using the official ARM logo, don’t worry, that also has been taken care of, we have official and written permission from ARM to use their logo. Now that has been out of the way, let’s move on.

EndeavourOS ARM was developed and tested on four ARM devices:

• Odroid N2
• Odroid N2+
• Odroid XU4
• Raspberry PI 4b

Theoretically EndeavourOS ARM can run on any ARM device but we recommend an ARM device with the following specs:

• The device must be supported by Archlinux ARM
• A Quad CPU with 1.5 GHz and up
• At least 2GB of RAM
• Two USB 3.0 ports for external drives and possibly additional USB 2 ports for keyboard, mouse, etc.
• A 1 Gbit ethernet connector

Other than the first specification, having less than the above specifications do not rule out that an install wouldn’t work. A 10/100 Mbit ethernet or only USB 2 ports would only mean that performance could be affected on certain operations.

On our ARM website we have added manuals and links for the following hardware:

• Pinebook Pro
• Pine64
• Rock64

These devices weren’t tested but in theory they are powerful enough to run a full blown Desktop Environment.

The installation

The installation has two stages: the first one installs Archlinux ARM Base and the second one runs a script that guides you through the installation process to install EndeavourOS as a Desktop machine or as a headless server.

For the first step, we offer an automated script for the tested devices and for the untested devices we refer to the manual coming from Archlinux ARM or in the case of the Pinebook Pro, to the install image for Arch, provided by Pine64.

We’re hoping with community feedback and with future hardware purchases, to offer an automated script for the untested devices as well.

The second step runs a script that will guide you through a simple process to install EndeavourOS on it, this script runs on any device that is running the Archlinux ARM Base.

In the end you will be running the desktop environment of your choice, you are used to from us. A lightweight system with an almost vanilla DE, ready to explore.

With the exception of Deepin, you can choose every DE you are used to from us: Xfce, LXqt, Mate, Cinnamon, Gnome, Budgie, Plasma and i3-WM

We hope you are as excited about these releases as we are because it was an adventure and a privilege to create this for you. Try them and have fun with it!