It’s been a while since we have been in touch with you, so I thought it was time to give you a small update on what is happening behind the scenes.
The original Cassini Nova was launched in March of this year and usually, our Nova releases mean that a new major release is coming soon.
I’m in support for moving to KDE Plasma by default on the Live environment and for the offline install. Not that Xfce is bad, it’s actually a really good option for low to medium end and older computers and for users who want a customizable DE using GTK without Plasma’s extensive options and don’t need fancy animations, but for the type of user EndeavourOS is targeting, I think it’s a good move; EndeavourOS is meant for users who are intermediate to advanced with Linux.
In my opinion, I think that you guys should move to KDE Plasma by default on the Live USB and for the default offline install because not a lot of good distros use KDE Plasma by default, and the ones that do often do so as a backup (Kubuntu, Manjaro KDE, Fedora KDE, and the late Linux Mint KDE flavor).
If you guys need any help with testing this new ISO; I certainly have enough Nvidia, AMD, and Intel devices to do so with!
I’m excited about the future of EndeavourOS!
Take your time on Galileo, EndeavourOS is awesome as it is, and “hum-drum shenanigans” and other life complications have increased for all of us in the last few years.
Is there a list of changes since R1 (or even since Nova)? For example, does it include a revised pacman.conf without the community repo, and does the installer now recognise apps newly added to the Arch repos (such as kasts and kio-admin) when they are in user_pkglist.txt? (I didn’t see anything in the announcement).
Hasn’t is always?
The only changes are the core package versions like the linux kernel, etc. for the live environment and the offline install option. R1 still shipped Linux kernel 6.2.
Cassini Nova R1 doesn’t. If kasts & kio-admin are in my user_pkglist.txt a message pops up before Calamares appears saying that they are not recognised (I can’t remember the exact wording as it’s been a little while since I saw it). I remove these two from my user_pkglist.txt and install them later on.
I’m going to do a test install of Cassini Nova R2 shortly and will report back…
The good news is that this doesn’t happen with R2 
KDE Gear 23.04 was released after R1, and at this point kasts moved from the AUR to the main repos. I’m guessing that the message when installing R1 was to do with an AUR package check implied by the mention of no AUR packages here https://discovery.endeavouros.com/installation/customizing-the-endeavouros-install-process/2022/03/
One piece of feedback… On booting the ISO, it now checks immediately for an internet connection and if there is none, a popup gives options including waiting for 10 seconds. I’m not as quick on the draw 
as I used to be, and a wait of 30 seconds to find your WiFi network in the list and input the password would be more helpful, not least because it pops up again while you’re trying to input your password.
EDIT: R2 also installs the latest pacman.conf without the community repo, so minor niggle about the internet connection popup aside, it’s a solid 
for R2 from me 
main reason for the rebuild wa sthe repo changes…
Not sure about why user_pkglist was not find the packages… it simply checks with pacman to see if packages exist in repos…
just checked and indeed it could happen that it does not find newly added packages because we do not update db before the installer is started… If you do a sudo pacman -Syy on the livesession it does find them.
@manuel could check this?
I’m guessing it was to do with packages moving from the AUR to main repos. It’s resolved now (or maybe not seeing your edit).
Thank you to all the 
team for this latest ISO. Take your time on Galileo (and Figaro & Magnifico etc) 
Well, as I love xfce I would keep it as default for live iso / installer.
Also, I’d like to see an option during installation to choose mkinitcpio instead of the default dracut.
While you are at it, make GNOME as default so everybody in Linux world is happy 
Bonus: Wayland by default 
Are there any statistics to check which DEs do most people use? I think the numbers may not be as obvious as most people think.
it IS pretty obvious all over and also consistent over time
Polls do not lie
Personally I don’t see why you would replace simple XFCE with the more complicated KDE. I had used KDE from when it was KDE4 through KDE Plasma5. It use to be a great desktop but has gone beyond being a good easy desktop. New people are going to find it very confusing and will end up looking else where. Like the old saying goes, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it!”.
it actually got easier to use with the last restructuring of settings that happened some years ago. Everytime I look elsewhere, I miss features and find other DE’s to complicated to configure to my liking (especially because other DE’s need lots of (unstable) external addons to get functionality that is simply there in KDE …)
“it actually got easier to use with the last restructuring of settings that happened some years ago.”
That is a matter of opinion. I will no longer put KDE on my system. As far as I am concerned KDE is the M$ of the Linux world. It is definitely not newbe friendly and you can take that to the bank.
