Notes on EndeavourOS(mudkip.me)
mudkip.me
Notes on EndeavourOS
https://mudkip.me/2024/03/28/Notes-on-EndeavourOS/
53 comments
EndeavourOS is great for an easy to use Arch distro. I built my kids some PCs, 3 in total. They all got endeavourOS and not issues so far (so far I've taught them how to upgrade). It's been a godsend for me, because I've been daily driving Arch for the last 15 years. I really have no desire to switch for my personal OS, and if I did it would deeper down the Linux rabbit hole not the opposite. It gave my kids a great of the box experience and it's the system I know how to maintain best.
EndeavourOS has been my daily driver for about 4 years - I'm a huge fan. A breeze to install, excellent community, and I like the QoL features/packages they've added.
Last time I tried an arch based "easy" installable distro it was a nightmare for me, this was probably 5 years ago. How likely am I to break my OS with EndeavourOS are there any things I should avoid? My interest in something like Arch is only in order to have access to more modern compilers and tools, as opposed to whatever is frozen in a Debian repo or whatever distro I'm using. I've been fine with POP but would like the flexibility that you get on Windows and Mac to use any version of a software.
> How likely am I to break my OS with EndeavourOS are there any things I should avoid?
If you have some Linux experience - unlikely I would say.
I'd suggest that you check https://archlinux.org/news/ from time to time, to see if there are any breaking changes / things that need manual intervention.
Asides from that, take care of your Pacnew files [1] and you should be good to go. EndeavourOS provides a "Welcome" application which makes this task simple.
Finally the EndeavourOS Forums are a super friendly place to get help in case you still manage to break something [2]
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave
[2] https://forum.endeavouros.com/
If you have some Linux experience - unlikely I would say.
I'd suggest that you check https://archlinux.org/news/ from time to time, to see if there are any breaking changes / things that need manual intervention.
Asides from that, take care of your Pacnew files [1] and you should be good to go. EndeavourOS provides a "Welcome" application which makes this task simple.
Finally the EndeavourOS Forums are a super friendly place to get help in case you still manage to break something [2]
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave
[2] https://forum.endeavouros.com/
In addition to 7839284023's suggestions, if you're making regular backups and not performing partial updates, I think it's unlikely you'll tank your OS and if you do, you got the backups. You mentioned debian and things to avoid post-install - if you're looking for something as invaluable and concentrated as dontbreakdebian, you won't find it with Arch (outside of simply pointing to the wiki).
EndeavourOS has their own wiki . I get the impression they were/are attempting to translate the Arch wiki to a more succinct and ingestible format, but many of the articles are several years old so I'd recommend vetting those that are applicable to your use case.
EndeavourOS has their own wiki . I get the impression they were/are attempting to translate the Arch wiki to a more succinct and ingestible format, but many of the articles are several years old so I'd recommend vetting those that are applicable to your use case.
> How likely am I to break my OS with EndeavourOS are there any things I should avoid?
The exact same chance Arch has to break something: so quite likely, as in, it's not a matter of IF, but a matter of WHEN. The exact WHEN being dependent on how unlucky you are.
I'm sure I'll get a dozen downvotes and replies from people saying they've been using Arch since the beginning of time and never had an issue, but a full update of EndevourOS left me without working sound. Not ideal considering I'm applying for jobs and need sound to work for interviews.
For that I need an OS that's 100% bulletproof, not something I need to read up tutorials, blogposts, newsletters, wikis, to learn how to manage, since I don't want another part time sys-admin job, I want something to JustWorks™ without any studies or maintenance.
For a secondary tinkering/learning machine it's a very nice OS since the documentation is also nice, but I would never daily drive it on a main machine that I use for earning a living.
The exact same chance Arch has to break something: so quite likely, as in, it's not a matter of IF, but a matter of WHEN. The exact WHEN being dependent on how unlucky you are.
I'm sure I'll get a dozen downvotes and replies from people saying they've been using Arch since the beginning of time and never had an issue, but a full update of EndevourOS left me without working sound. Not ideal considering I'm applying for jobs and need sound to work for interviews.
For that I need an OS that's 100% bulletproof, not something I need to read up tutorials, blogposts, newsletters, wikis, to learn how to manage, since I don't want another part time sys-admin job, I want something to JustWorks™ without any studies or maintenance.
For a secondary tinkering/learning machine it's a very nice OS since the documentation is also nice, but I would never daily drive it on a main machine that I use for earning a living.
Yup same, I was using it on my laptop that I fired up every 1 or 2 weeks and one update the bootloader broke so it was bye to Endeavor. I enjoyed it very much until then
Just curious; is there a distro you've found that fits the JustWorks™ requirements?
I haven't tried to daily drive too many distros at home to draw any conclusion.
At work, Ubuntu was also a nightmare, OpenSUSE was pretty solid, and at home Windows never caused me any issues so I'll be sticking to that until I have more time to try out switching to Linux again, but I do like Nobara and TuxedoOS as JustWorks distros, though like I said, i never daily drove them do draw an conclusions
At work, Ubuntu was also a nightmare, OpenSUSE was pretty solid, and at home Windows never caused me any issues so I'll be sticking to that until I have more time to try out switching to Linux again, but I do like Nobara and TuxedoOS as JustWorks distros, though like I said, i never daily drove them do draw an conclusions
Windows never caused you issues? That's an incredibly bold statement. I had to switch off of Windows because it was nothing but issues.
>Windows never caused you issues? That's an incredibly bold statement.
How so? It's not a fact, it's just how my experience was. Just because you had a different experience doesn't mean my experience was wrong or false, because like I said it's just my experience and not a fact and therefore it can neither be right or wrong.
As a free man, I will stick to whatever tool gave me the least issues and avoid those that have. Simple.
>I had to switch off of Windows because it was nothing but issues.
Good for you man. Remember, this isn't a competition, the OS is just a tool like your hammer or drill, not a religion, so nobody cares what your personal OS choices are what your reasons for your choices are, as long as you're happy with what you use that's all that matter, just don't judge others for their choices and reasons.
How so? It's not a fact, it's just how my experience was. Just because you had a different experience doesn't mean my experience was wrong or false, because like I said it's just my experience and not a fact and therefore it can neither be right or wrong.
As a free man, I will stick to whatever tool gave me the least issues and avoid those that have. Simple.
>I had to switch off of Windows because it was nothing but issues.
Good for you man. Remember, this isn't a competition, the OS is just a tool like your hammer or drill, not a religion, so nobody cares what your personal OS choices are what your reasons for your choices are, as long as you're happy with what you use that's all that matter, just don't judge others for their choices and reasons.
I put some of my family members on Ubuntu, it worked about as well as Windows ever did, but was hard to keep up-to-date, and every change I made to get them more recent software was a complication for future support. The end result was that they had a stable computer but one that was difficult to make do new things.
Last straw was jumping through the hoops to get proper Vulkan support on their video card for a game running through Wine. I switched them over to EndeavourOS and it's been loads easier, a lot of stuff works out-of-the-box specifically because it's a rolling release.
I think people sometimes underestimate how important it can be to be able to get OS/software patches immediately. Flatpak helps a little bit with that as well, some of the difficulty with Ubuntu was resolving dependencies -- but even with that, a lot of that difficulty came from trying to get bleeding edge or self-compiled software working with dependencies that just weren't updated yet in the Debian repos.
I spent a while worrying about whether being on Arch would mean everything would be unstable, but I've had the opposite experience, in practice it just means I have to break fewer things to get software running.
Last straw was jumping through the hoops to get proper Vulkan support on their video card for a game running through Wine. I switched them over to EndeavourOS and it's been loads easier, a lot of stuff works out-of-the-box specifically because it's a rolling release.
I think people sometimes underestimate how important it can be to be able to get OS/software patches immediately. Flatpak helps a little bit with that as well, some of the difficulty with Ubuntu was resolving dependencies -- but even with that, a lot of that difficulty came from trying to get bleeding edge or self-compiled software working with dependencies that just weren't updated yet in the Debian repos.
I spent a while worrying about whether being on Arch would mean everything would be unstable, but I've had the opposite experience, in practice it just means I have to break fewer things to get software running.
I really like EndeavourOS, compared to something like Manjaro. It's essentially 99% vanilla Arch with a few QoL improvements and a distinct theme. That's it.
Manjaro, on the other hand, breaks too many things and goes off the beaten path more than I care for. Pamac is kind of junk too, as I prefer yay.
Manjaro, on the other hand, breaks too many things and goes off the beaten path more than I care for. Pamac is kind of junk too, as I prefer yay.
I think Linux-ers need to start promoting non-debian family OSes.
For some reason Debian-family marketing of 'stable' really caught on, despite things like Fedora and SUSE being often more stable.
I hope in the future we can keep people away from Debian-family for daily desktops. Its such a terrible experience and it kept me going back to windows. Now that I'm off Debian-family distros, it genuinely feels like I'm using an OS that is higher quality than Windows. Its something of an amazing feeling and kind of gross I used something like Windows/Ubuntu for so long.
For some reason Debian-family marketing of 'stable' really caught on, despite things like Fedora and SUSE being often more stable.
I hope in the future we can keep people away from Debian-family for daily desktops. Its such a terrible experience and it kept me going back to windows. Now that I'm off Debian-family distros, it genuinely feels like I'm using an OS that is higher quality than Windows. Its something of an amazing feeling and kind of gross I used something like Windows/Ubuntu for so long.
Debian itself doesn't feel too "gross" to me. Ubuntu definitely does. I had things break way more often when I used Ubuntu than vanilla Arch, ironically. And the problems ran deeper and were harder to fix when they did pop up than Arch. Might've been something unique about the way I was using it. Not sure.
Life’s been great for me since I’ve moved primarily over to Fedora from Ubuntu as of I think version 36. Fedora always had this (unwarranted) reputation for not being stable, but it’s been by far the best Linux laptop experience I’ve had outside of Ubuntu in the early days (10.04 LTS was the GOAT for me back then) Haven’t tried openSUSE yet tough, pretty happy with Silverblue.
The problem is the word stable is confused with “doesn’t break” rather than the actual meaning of “software versions don’t change, fixes may/may not be backported.” Debian isn’t any more or less “stable (in the doesn’t break sort of way) than most any other distro, but it is in fact more stable (as in software doesn’t change) than Arch or Fedora.
As a community we need another term to define a stable (unchanging) distro.
The problem is the word stable is confused with “doesn’t break” rather than the actual meaning of “software versions don’t change, fixes may/may not be backported.” Debian isn’t any more or less “stable (in the doesn’t break sort of way) than most any other distro, but it is in fact more stable (as in software doesn’t change) than Arch or Fedora.
As a community we need another term to define a stable (unchanging) distro.
Just noticed this comment two weeks later. I will say that I absolutely love Fedora on my Intel NUC. Works great with the hardware, it supports Secure Boot, and dnf is a very tight package manager.
What's wrong with Debian? If you mean Ubuntu-family then I might get that, given the amount of pointless churn it's seen lately. But Debian itself is fine IME, and quite preferable to any Arch-derivative for production use.
I'd start by removing this false dichotomy between Arch and Debian. I think doing this unfairly promotes Debian in a light that is unwarranted. Debian is not easier or more stable(for desktop), that is just the marketing niche they fell under. Not to mention, there are many more families than Arch and Debian. To me, nothing holds a candle to Fedora.
Debian is fine for servers, but due to it using outdated Kernels and software, it makes being a daily user difficult.
Bought a nvidia GPU laptop with trackpad in 2023? On Debian, the GPU, Trackpad, and reddit videos are all going to require grandmas to breakout the terminal just to use them. (FYI the GPU thing is finally updated as they moved to Kernel 6)
Debian is fine for servers, but due to it using outdated Kernels and software, it makes being a daily user difficult.
Bought a nvidia GPU laptop with trackpad in 2023? On Debian, the GPU, Trackpad, and reddit videos are all going to require grandmas to breakout the terminal just to use them. (FYI the GPU thing is finally updated as they moved to Kernel 6)
> Debian is not easier or more stable(for desktop), that is just the marketing niche they fell under.
What? Debian is absolutely easier than Arch - it defaults to shipping a GUI and installation has been handled by a wizard for ~forever, while Arch long preferred "here's a live CD and a wiki page about how to manually construct a system" - and anything with actual releases is more stable than Arch's rolling approach ("stable" being in the sense of "if it worked yesterday it'll work tomorrow").
> Bought a nvidia GPU laptop with trackpad in 2023? On Debian, the GPU, Trackpad, and reddit videos are all going to require grandmas to breakout the terminal just to use them. (FYI the GPU thing is finally updated as they moved to Kernel 6)
Yes, new hardware is likely to need new drivers. Of course, once you hack in the bleeding edge packages it's hardly a stable/LTS OS anymore regardless.
What? Debian is absolutely easier than Arch - it defaults to shipping a GUI and installation has been handled by a wizard for ~forever, while Arch long preferred "here's a live CD and a wiki page about how to manually construct a system" - and anything with actual releases is more stable than Arch's rolling approach ("stable" being in the sense of "if it worked yesterday it'll work tomorrow").
> Bought a nvidia GPU laptop with trackpad in 2023? On Debian, the GPU, Trackpad, and reddit videos are all going to require grandmas to breakout the terminal just to use them. (FYI the GPU thing is finally updated as they moved to Kernel 6)
Yes, new hardware is likely to need new drivers. Of course, once you hack in the bleeding edge packages it's hardly a stable/LTS OS anymore regardless.
The false dichotomy is that you keep referencing Arch.
No one is disagreeing "Debian is absolutely easier than Arch"
Fedora, Endavour, OpenSUSE, may be easier than Debian. (Fedora is)
You fell for the exact false dichotomy by placing Arch vs Debian. There isnt 2, there is a circle of options, and Debian is not part of the consumer/daily driver circle.
No one is disagreeing "Debian is absolutely easier than Arch"
Fedora, Endavour, OpenSUSE, may be easier than Debian. (Fedora is)
You fell for the exact false dichotomy by placing Arch vs Debian. There isnt 2, there is a circle of options, and Debian is not part of the consumer/daily driver circle.
What terrible experience did you have? I've been daily driving Debian/Ubuntu on multiple machines for years, and I can't complain.
I've always thought it was weird that distros like Manjaro and EndeavourOS get lumped together as "arch derivatives" when the former doesn't even pull from the Arch repos.
I'm exactly the same. I use Arch on my work PC and home PC, because I have my setup heavily personalized. But when I want to spin up a VM or install something Arch-adjacent without worrying about a bunch of manual configuration, Endeavour is my new goto since I discovered it last year. Manjaro feels like too much of its own thing now. Plus the many debacles it's had.
Instead of EndeavourOS, I would rather use the archinstall script which comes by default. Archinstall provides an installation experience as easy as what EndeavourOS provides. On top of that, it makes it possible to do additional tweaks. For example, if I remember correctly, it was not possible to adjust compression flags of btrfs subvolumes with the GUI installation environment.
Archinstall is a blessing. I learned to install arch by myself following the wiki, and I learned a lot. But one day I wanted to install arch in a computer for my niece and with archinstall was just like any other installer with tty install wizard. It failed here and there with some setups, but I installed btrfs and gnome in minutes.
> I need to stay on the cutting edge for desktop environments, display protocols, and graphics drivers due to issues with NVIDIA and the Linux desktop (especially Wayland). Many developments are happening in real-time to improve them.
Only if you want to personally experience every single bug as it is introduced upstream.
Only if you want to personally experience every single bug as it is introduced upstream.
Sure. If you run rolling releases, you get new bugs and new fixes as they come out.
If you run a stable distro, you get the same bugs for the whole release.
There's merit to both strategies. I use Debian on everything I can, but that's not necessarily what I'd recommend everybody use.
If you run a stable distro, you get the same bugs for the whole release.
There's merit to both strategies. I use Debian on everything I can, but that's not necessarily what I'd recommend everybody use.
I wasn't referring specifically to rolling vs fixed release distros, and more just generally about the state of Nvidia's drivers on Wayland. Most distros still fallback to X11 with Nvidia because the Nvidia+Wayland still feels very much like a WIP.
or the middle ground of something like fedora where they update many packages during the release cycle.
My desktop is currently on EndeavorOS as an experiment until Ubuntu 24.06 comes out. Originally I went with Arch and I'm glad I went through the process of getting a working installation, but there were a lot of little DE tuning things I didn't really care to learn about doing myself.
Why on earth would you go back to debian-family after you got woke?
I genuinely don't understand what would bring you back to Ubuntu.
I genuinely don't understand what would bring you back to Ubuntu.
Probably LTS
That and I like the changes Ubuntu makes to Gnome. I'm still sad about Unity going away.
I'm going to be "that guy"... I used to distro hop and discovered that every distro has its strengths and weaknesses. Then 2 months ago someone told me about NixOS. I was skeptical at first, as it seemed a bit culty. Now I'm absolutely converted.
The reason is simple. Human instructions on provisioning a system like these (as good as they are) are now obsolete. If you know someone who has a working system, then you can have a working system too, just ask for their configuration. Want to experiment with some new configuration or try a bleeding edge software update? Go ahead, and just roll back if it goes wrong.
With NixOS the operating system is a text file, everything else is just cache.
The reason is simple. Human instructions on provisioning a system like these (as good as they are) are now obsolete. If you know someone who has a working system, then you can have a working system too, just ask for their configuration. Want to experiment with some new configuration or try a bleeding edge software update? Go ahead, and just roll back if it goes wrong.
With NixOS the operating system is a text file, everything else is just cache.
>Disable Secure Boot and Fast Boot in the BIOS. If Fast Boot is enabled, accessing the BIOS by pressing F2 is difficult. Instead, I have to use Settings > System > Recovery > Advanced startup in Windows, and after rebooting, choose Troubleshoot > Advanced options > UEFI Firmware Settings to access the BIOS.
You can reboot into uefi directly using console command. Don't remember exactly syntax from the top of my head, but it's trivial to find it online
You can reboot into uefi directly using console command. Don't remember exactly syntax from the top of my head, but it's trivial to find it online
I think it's `systemctl reboot --firmware-setup`
And in Windows it's `shutdown /r /fw`.
I think you can also hold the key pressed while it's powering on
I installed EndeavourOS on my wife's Lenovo.
Generally I am happy with it, however the upgrade to Plasma 6 was not without hitch. There was some incompatibility of the Breeze theme which caused a login loop. I told my wife that someone made a mistake and I will restart systemd-logind each time she got into the login loop. After a week the problem resolved itself.
Generally I am happy with it, however the upgrade to Plasma 6 was not without hitch. There was some incompatibility of the Breeze theme which caused a login loop. I told my wife that someone made a mistake and I will restart systemd-logind each time she got into the login loop. After a week the problem resolved itself.
Is EndeavourOS relatively lightweight? I currently use Archcraft with Openbox, since it's a light Arch distro without bloatware that's easy to install, and I've been really pleased so far, but I'm always curious about alternatives.
Every distro is almost the same. Endeavour is lightweight but not the lightest. It all depends on what you want, and if you want to test arch in some extent, just use archinstaller, which is an amazing tool, easy to set up even some weird window managers like qtile.
If you want lightweight Arch distro, I think many would recommend vanilla arch. Many automated installation script nowadays.
I think this blog post is a great example of the really sad state of package managers. It uses a bunch of them:
* firefox extensions
* pacman/yay
* flatpak
* prezto
* goenv
* fnm
* cargo
Then it also installs some applications manually:
* nvidia-inst
* insomnia
The fact that people have to go through this many to get everything one wants feels like a shortcoming of everything else.
* firefox extensions
* pacman/yay
* flatpak
* prezto
* goenv
* fnm
* cargo
Then it also installs some applications manually:
* nvidia-inst
* insomnia
The fact that people have to go through this many to get everything one wants feels like a shortcoming of everything else.
Good thing that for me everything out of that list is replaced by nix :).
Why does it start with adding a Windows Registry key?
This is their personal notes on installing Endeavour in their environment. They're likely dual-booting and Windows time gets screwed up without that registry key due to differences in how Windows and Linux store system time.
If you dual-boot Windows and Linux you will want to set Windows to use UTC time or otherwise you will notice your Windows clock always being off (in my case by 1 hour YMMV).
He's probably dual booting.
A note in Logseq I use to track how I install and configure EndeavourOS.
What's the process of going from Logseq note to blog post? Do you just copy and paste with some manual editing or are you using a tool to turn your markdown file directly into a blog post?
I'm not GP, but I use Logseq and also turn some pages into blog posts.
No it's unfortunately more complicated than that because of how logseq uses an outline style. I will typically use one bullet per paragraph and it can often copy/paste as rich text into various places such as the Google Docs, and from GDocs you can copy/paste into almost anything. I also often end up using Vim (for ex commands especially) to apply some changes like removing the `- ` from the beginning of each paragraph. It sounds worse than it is in practice when writing it out, but it's also not as simple as copy and paste.
No it's unfortunately more complicated than that because of how logseq uses an outline style. I will typically use one bullet per paragraph and it can often copy/paste as rich text into various places such as the Google Docs, and from GDocs you can copy/paste into almost anything. I also often end up using Vim (for ex commands especially) to apply some changes like removing the `- ` from the beginning of each paragraph. It sounds worse than it is in practice when writing it out, but it's also not as simple as copy and paste.
I always liked cachyos over endeavouros for arch....