Ugh. Tell me about it. Most Arch Purists will just tell you that no distro is “Arch” unless it is Vanilla Arch.
Yup. It really makes no difference from a practical standpoint. If one day Arch decides to ship with a default DE (let’s say XFCE) and then EndeavourOS decides to ship KDE by default, I highly doubt that anyone would consider the different choices in default DEs as a “deviation from Arch.”
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Exactly. Nothing changes in your system if you use dracut compared to mkinitcpio, except how the initramfs is generated. Both are supported on vanilla Arch. Sure, mkinitcpio is the default, so what?
This is not like the situation with other init systems, for example. If you want to run OpenRC on Arch instead of soystemd, you can’t really, without rebuilding half of the repos. That’s why you can’t find OpenRC in Arch repos, and that is what makes Artix different from Arch.
EndeavourOS just installing dracut by default is no deviation at all from Arch. It gets dracut from the Arch repos. Also, you have the option to not use dracut when installing EndeavourOS. So the installer just gives you a nice GUI choice you’ve already had before when installing Arch the Arch way.
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This isn’t true on the latest ISO. You can switch after installation though. It’s a 2-3 command process
This point did cross my mind, but I wasn’t sure if the choice was programmed into Calamares. I switched to both dracut and Systemd-boot from an existing installation. But it’s good to know that the installation process still provides this kind of flexibility. 
Arch is like Spaghetti Carbonara. Carbonara is guanciale, eggs, Pecorino Romano (maybe mixed with Parmesan), black pepper, spaghetti. If a chef adds anything, cream, herbs, garlic, peas, etc, then it is no longer a carbonara. Arch is much the same. When people add their own customization, it ceases to be purely Arch and becomes an Arch-based system. 
No, that’s completely wrong. Arch is a DIY system, every user is expected to customise it and make it his own.
What defines Arch is the repos. If it uses Arch repos, it’s Arch. That’s why we jokingly say that EndeavourOS is 99% Arch, since we have, in addition to Arch, a tiny endeavouros repo.
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Exactly. I was about to point out that if you look at most “Arch” systems used by most Arch Purists, none of those systems are Vanilla Arch anyway. But your way of stating is much more elegant.
@keybreak Where did you even find all these pictures, man? 
In meme thread of course!
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Almost correct. More precisely, not complete. When I (or you, or anyone) installs Arch via the Wiki or with the archinstall script, we have installed Arch. Once installed, it is now my Arch-based system. If I give my Arch-based system to you in the form of an ISO, and you install my Arch-based system, you cannot be properly said to have installed Arch. Academic, of course, but nonetheless, accurate.
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A tiny repo consisting of only 69 packages, in fact.
$ pacman -Sl endeavouros | wc -l
69
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Noice!
I have a feeling @anthony93 have found an easter egg from devs 
Currently I have 36 of the 69 installed. 
You are totally right. Many people think that if distributions that are very close to each other offer different desktop environments by default, then they will already be different distributions, but this is not the case. This may be because some users identify Linux distributions with that DE , which they use by default.
BLOAT!!11 
That’s like… 0.5% of the Arch repo…
Arch repo has 13444 packages in total.
Let’s see…
~🐸 pacman -Sl endeavouros | grep installed
endeavouros endeavouros-keyring 20220614-1 [installed]
endeavouros endeavouros-mirrorlist 4.11-1 [installed]
endeavouros eos-packagelist 2.1-1 [installed]
endeavouros rate-mirrors 0.11.1-1 [installed]
endeavouros yay 11.3.1-1 [installed]
So, basically, I am maintaining a separate mirrorlist and a keyring, in order to have yay, and rate-mirrors, which I’m using to maintain the mirrorlist.
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