An Arch based distro going for all the bells and whistles that people forget about is RebornOS. Their phylosophy is the opposite of EOS’. For those unhappy with the frugal choice of packages in EOS, it might be an option.
EOS, while having a friendly atttitude towards noobs is not really a Linux newcomer’s best pick. Terminal centric means there is at least a bit if Linux experience required. A distro can’t be everyone’s best pick, that’s why it’s good there are so many distros. A lot of choice for a lot of different requirements.
I’ve seen several replies here mentioning Garuda, and I want to add : Please don’t actually recommend this distro to new users, or beginner users transitioning to Arch. I have nothing against Garuda, it’s a great distro, preloaded with helpful GUI apps, easier to install and looks pretty at that. However, those things would usually be the downfall for new users that aren’t familiar with how Arch works. I’ve seen a lot of users having trouble understanding what went wrong since they depended entirely on the GUI, and troubleshooting those problems aren’t easy either. Especially when the system is still borked when they restored it from previous backup, without understanding why it broke in the first place.
Garuda isn’t really close to a vanilla arch (or any common distro for that matter), not only they use Zen kernel, they also come preloaded with several tweaks to the system that users might know nothing about. All those things, including GUI updaters and apps are great on paper to have pre-installed, but they add to the complexity for users trying to troubleshoot their problems. I would prefer for users to actually discover those tweaks and custom kernels on their own, understand them and apply them manually if they want to, after they’ve learnt about it. I would argue that EOS is actually better than Garuda for new users who are willing to learn, at least users would have to actively search and understand what they did to the system themselves.
The thing is, not everyone actually wants to learn about Linux. They just want something that works out of the box. In many cases, if something stops working they will just re-install anyway. A distro like that is a good fit, especially for gamers where some of the other “easy to use” distros may not have packages fresh enough for their needs.
Does that describe me, personally? No, I want a system that is nothing like that at all. But it is still great that distros like that exist for those who prefer them.
Does that describe me, personally? No, I want a system that is nothing like that at all. But it is still great that distros like that exist for those who prefer them
Yes I agree, but this is what I meant. It is a great distro for people who preferred those things pre-applied, heck I might even be one of them. Not for somebody who knows nothing about Linux, asked the community for a “gaming distro” and got recommended a bleeding-edge system that would break at any time, without them knowing why. Of course like you said they could simply re-install the whole system, but that’s rarely the case.
Obviously it’s the users choice for what they want to use for their first time experiences, but I would at least recommend something easier for them. For example there’s already Pop!_OS which worked OOTB for gaming, and easier to learn.
There are a lot of things that are difficult in Arch. Installing programs isn’t one of them IMHO. This is the easiest thing there is besides installing EndeavourOS. The hard part is configuring hardware or building a package or fixing something that may get broken along the way which happens in every distro. So having a GUI is nice for some and i do use them also at times for a purpose. But they are just as easy to install as anything else. That is the whole purpose of having yay as an AUR helper to do this so that people get use to using the Terminal. The fact is the people don’t know what program to install. That is the crux of the problem. They only know a GUI because they find it on a particular distro and get familiar with it. So they go looking for it everywhere else and that’s not really helpful.
they use a systemd shim but i am no expert in init systems … i am just a satisfied user
i would always recommend MX for beginners (after using mint. pop, manjaro. ubuntu. kubuntu…etc)…my daughter has used it since she was 9 without issue and they don’t get more beginnerish than that and i have also installed for 4 friends and colleagues …
only once have i had to fix anything for any of them (she once called me to ask if i could fix her internet…turns out she had had a power cut.)… that is the level of tech know how i am talking about …frankly if my mate layla can use linux to web browse and zoom without breaking something then anybody can
of course, you can enable systemd boot as your default in grub customiser but i have never had a cause to do so … rarely wanted to install a snap for example … otherwise i have not come across an app that the system d shim doesn’t handle without fuss
anyways … distros come in all shapes and sizes and i think as long as you are willing to put a little effort in, then there are at least 50 that a beginner could choose
i put 18 distro iso s onto a ventoy USB and messed about with all of them a bit until i decided to go with endeavour
as far as i can tell, using the vast majority of linux distros is reallly not that hard these days thanks to the devs …
my youngest daughter uses windows because she likes playing roblox …and windows truly baffles me … it is much., much harder to handle than linux …i have zero control over it and find it impossible to troubleshoot
i think a lot of people just assume linux is really hard … and that is if they have even heard of it in the first place… most of my friends actually use macs because they wouldn’t be seen dead in starbucks without one… and honestly, they are all completely clueless whatever OS you put in front of them
i broke garuda twice last week and have no idea how i managed it … the second time, i couldn’t even boot from the snapshot option in grub so i decided to move on …
Yeah, sorry about that. I meant as a bleeding-edge system, new updates could break it at any time, and those users could very well don’t realize that when something stops working.
Yeah, but bad updates are exceptionally rare. And on Garuda, you have automatic btrfs snapshots enabled by default as a pacman hook, so if that happens, undoing a bad update takes just a second or two.
I know, but unfortunately on Garuda I had a lot of them. My system broke twice in a month using it, and usually it was caused by conflicts, which I don’t even have on EOS or my Arch installation despite having almost the same configuration (minus Garuda’s preloaded extras, kernels and everything) Thankfully the btrfs snapshots helped a lot but I don’t think this would be a good experience for new users.
I guess this is a misunderstanding about what “beginner” means. For me the term beginner describes the beginning of a journey. A beginner will be intermediate and at the end an expert in Linux. For me this is different to a normal user. Normal users like my mother in law or my wife are not on a journey to become Linux experts. Therefore I would not call them beginners. They are users.
For me a beginner is an administrator. A beginner has root access. A beginner can do things a regular user cant do. If somebody wants to learn Linux from beginner to experts I would not recommend any distribution which has systemd disabled or even removed. systemd is a key feature that a beginner needs to learn.
Even though I like to use Endeavour OS, I wouldn’t recommend any arch-based system to newcomers. Of course, it’s only a recommendation, they can decide what they want. I’m not the “get off my lawn” type but arch systems are for users who wanna put the time in and learn, fixing it when something breaks. My recommendation would be Ubuntu and Pop, and maybe manjaro if they want (or have to because of hardware), all with Gnome desktop. I can’t do without KDE like the next person but I get that it might overwhelm a newcomer with the plethora of choices and customization.
Well you made a good choice. I agree with you MX is okay for beginners and yes there are lots to choose from. I have probably tried the top 100 give or take a few. I’m no expert but i know what i like and that’s not always what others like but i wouldn’t have any problem recommending EndeavourOS either. I believe it depends on the person whose going to use it. There are some people that just have trouble more than others.
i was watching the bigdaddy linux episode with Bryan of Endeavour
he explicitly said that he does not see EOS as a beginner’s distro … the episode was made a few months after the distro launched…maybe perspectives have changed but he seemed quite emphatic about it
Totally agree. My point above was always that EndeavourOS is a great distro for noobs to Arch based distros, not total Linux noobs. I just think it needs one more program to help bring in a few converts who don’t have time to memorize the Arch wiki or become a pacman ninja in their first five minutes after install before they kick the tires on this OS. If you make the barrier to try out EndeavourOS too hard and they just go back to Mint or Ubuntu or wherever they came from without sticking around long enough to discover the pot of gold that is EndeavourOS.
