Second week after the stable release

Monday the fifteenth is already one and a half week ago and I must say that the overall reception of our very first official release is more positive than we thought.

From my (very hot) place behind the desk I want to give the community a big shout out, the friendly vibe and the very large willingness to help your fellow members, especially to those who just joined our community is more than commendable. Thank you so much, because this is the Antergos spirit we wanted to carry on in this distro.

The media attention on our first release was also beyond our expectations, we never imagined that local and established writers, bloggers, vloggers and podcasters would jump into our first release in these numbers. So to everyone who wrote, talked or made a video about us: Thank you so much and we are taking your critical notes very serious for our upcoming releases.

On the subject of critical notes I want to clear something I’ve read on the forum or heard/read in the media on us.

The media often calls us the Antergos successor, this is true to some extent because this distro was born after Antergos announced its end and like them, we’re trying to achieve an easy to use installer for Arch.

Now our stable release is here to install and play with, it is obviously clear that we took a different road than Antergos. Our initial intention has always been to preserve the friendly and helpful community Antergos was known for. Being around the Antergos forum as a member and later as a moderator, I’ve noticed that a large part of the community members helped out by giving terminal commands to other members, instead of recommending GUI apps and most of the times the OP was happy to follow those instructions.

By seeing that often happen on the Antergos forum, I came up with the idea to make the terminal very essential from the start, but to have a small layer of convenience shipped with the distro. This is the reason why EndeavourOS doesn’t ship an office suite, an email client or GUI installers like Octopi or Pamac by default. By excluding those packages/apps we are not trying to be elitist or pretending to be Arch purists, (I mean we ship yay by default, that’s a big no-no in an Arch purist vision) but by installing those yourself with the terminal, we’re trying to give you a better understanding of what Pacman and Arch is all about. We made a very basic wiki article on it. http://endeavouros.com/docs/pacman/pacman-basic-commands/ (The wiki will be bigger in time, I’ll make a separate post on how to submit a wiki article)

Linux and specifically Arch are all about freedom of choice, we provide a basic install that lets you explore those choices with a small layer of convenience. We will never judge you by installing GUI apps like Pamac or even work with sandbox solutions like Flatpak or Snaps. It’s up to you what you are installing to make EndeavourOS work in your circumstances, that’s the main difference we have with Antergos or Manjaro, but like Antergos we will try to help you if you run into a problem with one of your installed packages.

Don’t forget that the Antergos devs ended their journey, because lack of time was the problem, by keeping the repo small we’re trying to avoid that.

With this in mind, we are positive that EndeavourOS is the perfect learning experience not only with Arch but with Linux in general. So enjoy this experience and every learning experience comes with making mistakes, don’t be afraid of making those, it will make you stronger and it builds up your confidence. like I said at the start of this post: We’re blessed with a terrific community to guide you through it.