EndeavourOS Artemis: Arch Linux, but a bit friendlier

EndeavourOS is a rolling-release Linux distro based on Arch Linux. Although the project is relatively new, having started in 2019, it's the successor to an earlier Arch-based distro called Antergos, so it's not quite as immature as its youth might imply. It's a little more vanilla than Antergos was – for instance, it uses the …

[HereIAmJH]

Arch decendents

I was interested in looking at it until you said it was built on systemd. I have been using Artix, which is also based on Arch, for several years. I prefer KDE over Gnome, and the lightweight desktops are just a little too lightweight for me. Although I tend to use LxQT most of the time.

I prefer rolling release distributions. We can probably blame Microsoft, but I have never liked doing full version upgrades on a PC ever since getting burned by Win95. Rolling releases let me do it a little at a time, while with a full version upgrade I tend to want to format the drive and start fresh.

I'm using OpenRC to avoid the systemd cancer. And about my only complaint with Artix is the community is too small. So often you have to fall back to Arch documentation to find a solution to a problem. That can be problematic in areas where Artix diverges from Arch.

[VoiceOfTruth]

Here goes my judging a book by its cover

-> EndeavourOS

Congratulations on using the correct spelling for endeavour.

-> It also bundles yay to easily fetch packages from the Arch User Repository, AUR. The yay command takes the same switches as pacman does,

If ever two apps deserved to be merged it is pacman and yay. It's like having /bin/ls and /bin/ls-etc which is a wrapper around /bin/ls to look in /etc. And the name... it's as unintuitive as it gets. Even "yarp" in Hot Fuzz was understandable and derivable to "narp".

-> When you run the installation program, it asks which of its two modes to use: offline or online.

This is a good feature, because I have seen more than one Linux installation get their over inflated knickers in a twist when it "thinks" the network is there but is not. Asking do you want offline or online yields a definite answer.

-> Xfce, KDE Plasma, GNOME, MATE, Cinnamon, Budgie, LXQt, LXDE, and the i3 tiling window manager....

-> Impressively, there are Community Editions with even more choices, with options for OpenBox, Deepin, and additional tiling environments: Sway, BSPWM, Qtile, LeftWM, and the homegrown WORM.

That's a heck of a lot of desktops. Despite my usual reservations about seemingly endless distros (and umpteen choices even within those distros) I'm glad to see that WORM gets a mention. It's very minimalist for those who like that sort of thing.

-> The distro is systemd-based, but by default, neither Flatpak nor Snap are installed, and there's no software store. The Xfce installation is based on traditional X.org (version 21.1.3), with no trace of Wayland to be seen.

Front page news. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, you don't need systemd or Wayland. Your world will not crumble.

-> After you install, you will have to make your way up the learning curve of Arch's command-line tools.

This is really my biggest bugbear about all the different package managers (and to some extent configuration managers where they exist). You have pulled your hair out thanks to the obscurities of dpkg and apt. You give an RPM distro a try, and have to learn a whole bunch of new commands to do the same thing you thought you already knew. Now it's over to pacman. If there really cannot be one package manager, why can there not be the equivalent of LSB (perhaps a bad example, as LSB is no more) or POSIX for Linux package managers. There is no reason why they can not all take $pkgmanager -install $package-name, to install, and -uninstall to uninstall it, and they can do whatever they want behind the scenes. Instead there is "install" "--install" "-i" "-S", and more. Here choice is not a good thing, it is a waste of time. Unless you are aiming to receive a certification in Linux package managers.

[RockBurner]

Re: Here goes my judging a book by its cover

I take the point about standardising things like commands etc fully.... however:

https://xkcd.com/927/

[jmch]

Re: Here goes my judging a book by its cover

"And the name... it's as unintuitive as it gets"

I guess you're talking about 'yay'... but for me, I can never associate pacman with package manager, it's always a side-on view of this guy------------------>>>>>

[keith 9]

EndeavourOS is a very easy way to try Arch

For the curious or someone looking to move on from Ubuntu etc.

There is an uber friendly forum with exemplary support :)