I made a post a few days ago asking your opinion on Manjaro and it was very mixed, with a slightly negative overall opinion. I heard some recommend EndeavourOS instead and did some online research and it seems to be pretty solid and not have the repository problem that Manjaro has.

Just for context I am a Linux noob and have only used Mint for about the past six months. While I don’t have any major complaints, I am looking to explore more distros and the Arch repository with its rolling releases. I am not a huge fan of how certain packages on apt are a few years old and outdated. However, I also don’t have the time to be always configuring my OS and just want something that works well out of the box.

Is EndeavourOS a solid choice?

  • Molecular0079@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    It’s a solid choice for a lot of the reasons you mentioned. I used it for a long time before switching over to regular Arch and I still use it as a live USB to recover my Arch install or to rollback to an older BTRFS snapshot.

    I will say though that it is sorta barebones enough it essentially becomes a gateway drug to regular Arch. If you’re curious, you might want to check out the official archinstall installer that’s bundled with the official Arch iso. It really makes it quite easy to get a working Arch install up and running.

    • NathanUp
      1·
      1 year ago

      What made you decide to switch to vanilla arch?

      • Molecular0079@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Two reasons actually:

        1. After getting really familiar with EndeavourOS, I was just curious about how hard an actual Arch install was. Then I found out about the official archinstall tool bundled in the ISO, decided to try it out, and it gave me a relatively barebones KDE desktop that was super snappy and that I could expand however I wanted. It just felt nice so I decided to stick with it. Now I am so used to using archinstall on my many Arch deployments (desktop, DIY NAS, home theater PC, work laptop, Surface Pro 7) that it really just feels like home.

        2. After Antergos shut down, I briefly used Anarchy installer. When that also shutdown, I became a bit wary about the longevity of these smaller community-driven Arch-derivatives. I don’t have anything against them and it’s super cool that these projects exist to expand the appeal of Arch to more users, but personally I wanted to be familiar with something that I knew would exist for a really long time and wouldn’t close down due to the developers getting too tired of doing maintenance, which is a very real thing in FOSS. I am constantly getting new devices and installing Arch on them, so finding a more permanent solution that I knew was always going to be there was important to me.