Endeavour OS isn't meeting my expectations (in a good way)

General system Newbie
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“Arch-based.” “Intermediate.” “Terminal-centric.” “Non-LTS Kernel.”

All of these phrases seem intended to scare away Linux novices, yet I’m having a great time with EndeavourOS. This is my third distro, after Pop! and Zorin. I switched because someone recommended I try a distro which uses the most recent kernel, to try and fix a video-acceleration problem (still not fixed, unfortunately). I was expecting it to take some work, but I’ve found that Endeavour is actually much more “out-of-the-box” functional than those distros which actually advertise themselves as super user-friendly. Some things which didn’t work on Zorin, like bluetooth and file search, worked smoothly with Endeavour. Setup was painless: the chores I did have to do were mostly the same ones I needed to do on those other distros. Honestly, it wasn’t any more tedious to set up than Windows.

I realize now that I shouldn’t try to set up linux so that it’s super-reliable, because things WILL break. Rather, it’s important to make yourself as receptive as possible to linux experts who can fix the problems. Since it seems the best linux contributors use Arch, that means I should use Arch. There’s actually not anything special about arch that I particularly like; it’s just that it comes with the privilage of lots of great user-made resources. The AUR is a treasure, and one of the earlier signs that Arch might be a good idea is that non-Arch-related discussions constantly cite the Arch wiki.

Seriously, shout-out to the Arch wiki: the Arch forum may be toxic as all get-out, but the wiki actually is very approachably written.

Another thing that makes Endeavour great is the bundling of KDE Plasma. I understand that, in theory, I can use pretty much any desktop with any distro, but, as a novice, that’s intimidating. Plasma is practically all I could ask for in a desktop environment, and the whole thing (Endeavour + the newer kernels + plasma) is more stable than those “user friendly” distros I tried before.

I’m genuinely confused by the “terminal-centric” label that comes with Endeavour. What exactly is limited to the terminal? System updates? Package management? I think that’s kinda it. Yet even the official Endeavour tutorials seem downright apologetic about requiring the terminal sometimes. Maybe I’ve short-circuit this aspect of the OS just by using KDE Plasma, which is pretty comprehensive in its desktop features, but I feel like my terminal usage has been completely reasonable. It’s not that I don’t use the terminal, it’s that the things I use it for are seldom Endeavour-specific.

In summary: Endeavour (with KDE Plasma) seems like a completely reasonable distro for linux novices. Maybe team Endeavour should pat itself on the back, and not worry too much about maintaining the good-Arch-hard-Arch clout.

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As someone who is new to endeavourOS as well I have also found it easy to use, I also used pop OS before and much prefer the KDE desktop. Used the terminal to install a package manager and after that only really use the terminal to do updates. first Linux os I was able to get start citizen to run on.

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Welcome to the EndeavourOS forum. I hope you enjoy your time here.

Thanks for giving EnOS a try. :enos:

Pudge

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How the HECK did you get Star Citizen to run on Linux? That’s sortof a long-term goal of mine.

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Install lutris if you have not already. then install an app called lug-helper from the AUR. open Lug helper and run the Prefight check and let it make the necessary changes. Next click install star citizen it will open luris and install the game. Once the game is installed, start star citizen launcher then in the lug helper tool click Deploy Easy anti-cheat workaround and you should be good to go. Link to the org that made the install tool and a link to their discord.

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When we started out, back in 2019, we received a lot of slack for not having GUI tools for updates and searching packages like Pamac by default and a lot of people, including bloggers and vloggers, saw it as either a missed opportunity or a very young distro with a very obvious flaw. Certainly, since the distro installs with Calamares, the expectation was that we also came with the entire out-of-the-box experience.

Another significant part was that we sprung off from Antergos and they shipped Pamac and other stuff as well. So, the expectations in the early days were that we were going to be a clone of our predecessor.

We learned from some of Antergos’ mistakes, like including Pamac and when it broke the whole community lashed out at the devs while it was Manjaro who made the changes.
So, we emphasized the terminal use by the addition of the tagline.

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While EndeavourOS comes with a lot of things preconfigured (and some tiny amount of bloat), it is still Arch, and Arch is a do-it-yourself system. This means that you, the user, decide what to make of it. You can make your system as terminal centric as you want it to be, including having no GUI session.

By default, package management is terminal-centric on EndeavourOS. GUI package management is not supported. The software is provided in the official Arch repos, and the AUR. That said, if you are stubborn and/or potentially, stupid, nobody is preventing you from using Pamac or some other GUI pacman wrapper on EndeavourOS, apart from the fact that they are all crap.

I’ve always maintained that EndeavourOS is great for people who are using a desktop GNU+Linux system for the first time, but it does require a specific mindset not found with everybody. And that’s okay, there is no single GNU+Linux distro that fits everybody.

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It could also bite in a way that could get you seriously thinking about returning to the “homeland”. Have to choose judiciously.

Due to the issues about Nvidia and Wayland, I cannot completely recommend anything GNOME nor KDE Plasma of the latest to anyone else. I would say, go ahead and try it but you’re on your own and beware! I’ve been lucky so far with KDE and the latest kernels because I have an ageing laptop without Nvidia. But I hate to be the one recommending something when the other person insists so much on Arch-based and then he/she winds up with a mess and he/she becomes envious at me because it runs better for me.

^
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I say that because I’m finding people blaming the whole distro for D.E. shortages such as inability to put icons on a desktop or main panel. It could revolve entirely around how it looks and how easy it is to acquire applications that don’t crash and that are “up to date”.

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I am so grateful Pamac is not included. I think that is the major problem that kept crashing my Manjaro install and thankfully lead me to here. Yay is amazing and I can search for packages just fine with it.

On a side note, I think Manjaro+AUR is the reason everyone thinks Arch is so unstable. Everyone bragging about how awesome the AUR is and install Manjaro to have it. That is a bomb waiting to explode.

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There nothing wrong with KDE since it doesn’t default to using Wayland whether you have Nvidia or not! I have no issues at all with KDE. I don’t use Wayland but it works fine on Wayland for me with AMD graphics. I like using simple screen recorder which doesn’t work with Wayland so that’s one reason i won’t use it right now.

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You are on to something. A Manjaro forum post, and they don’t even support AUR. It’s DIY/On-your-own-risk; the same for Arch. Pamac users probably forget they had to enable AUR within the application as it is/was defaulted to being Off.

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I second this completely. I was out looking for a new distro for my daily driver and EndeavourOS was pretty highly recommended. However, every YouTube review I saw or comment I read about the individual user experience, every one mentioned that it is terminal-centric and that it was expected since the OS is based on Arch Linux.

This was a some what deal breaker for me and so I thought I would keep looking and eventually I settled on Ultramarine Linux and tried to install that. To my surprise, the live OS froze thrice and I had force shut down my laptop to get out of that situation. Not sure whether the issue was with the distro itself or the way I created the bootable USB stick.

I am glad that I had that issue and was forced to reconsider EndeavourOS. I was able to install it within 20 mins and make it a near perfect drop-in replacement for my previous Linux OS. It has only been a day since I have install Endeavour on my system but I am loving it so far :crossed_fingers:

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I am glad pamac, snap and flatpaks are not installed by default EndeavourOS. That is one of the main reasons I use this OS today.

Regarding using a terminal it took me ten minutes to teach my 2 daughters to update, search and install packages in terminal. They both love ytfzf and ncspot wich are both terminal based youtube and spotify apps so I think it’s a learning issue and not so much what the “label” says. They both are very openminded to new things and comfortable using EndeavourOS. :+1:

My wife on the other hand is just lazy :wink:

Only good edition of Manjaro in my mind was the community edition of openbox in 2013 or 2014 i think it was wich I realy enjoyed using.

I think I am lazy too :confused:

Cheers :slight_smile:

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Like I said above, EndeavourOS is not for everyone. No distro is. People are different and like different things.

That said, as a rough generalisation, children and young adults have an easier time adapting their workflow – it’s easier for them to jump outside their comfort zone, and thus they tend to find more efficient solutions more quickly. The older people are the more they tend to be more stuck in their comfort zone and their habits tend to be more inert.

As a dramatic example, try to learn to play a music instrument as an adult – it is a hundred times more difficult.

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I was just like you about Ubuntu, wouldn’t try any flavor because it keeps getting negative beef mainly because of Snaps but for other silly reasons. There are people dedicated to bashing the most popular Linux distributions wherever you look. Then there are people who call Linux inferior to another OS. Sometimes one has to take the plunge for the desire to get a better experience than another thing that is being “highly” recommended.

For example, I never got the high marks for MX Linux and Linux Mint. Either of those two would have turned me away from any Arch-based distro if I followed the “reviews” too closely and if I obeyed completely the trash talk about Fedora, Manjaro and others. Now I bristle when I find someone else commenting about EndeavourOS and has the nerve to indicate that having Arch is even better. I’ll bet that half those false praises about Arch came from installing EndeavourOS, Archbang or something else other than the mother ship. They wouldn’t admit it, though because “BTW I use Arch”.

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Just a passing thought about the apparent Arch-but-not-really crowd - perhaps don’t be TOO hard on them. Until the revamping of Arch install methods, it could be REALLY hard to get a system going without some help. Using EnOS or, say, ArcoLinux to get running is understandable and might well lead to enough knowledge to set up and run an actual Arch after a while. This means that the knowledge is legit :grin:

of course, I might be biased, as I learned from Arco before Arch'ing
(later I switched from Arch to EndeavourOS and Garuda mainly)
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Why did you personally switch from plain Arch to Endeavour?

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EndeavourOS exceeds my expectations in a way that Arch never could. It’s the installer, it’s the forum members, it’s the great group of people that have been here from the beginning including myself.

EndeavourOS is like yogurt. You can have plain Arch or you can have the mixed purple berry light. :laughing:

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The people unable or “unwilling” to have Arch will always be faced with this question. It’s the push to have the original, the exponent. It’s the attempt to put the other shops out of business. That plain yogurt I bought the other day tastes bad, I don’t care if it’s the best thing to eat right now. I want some blueberries on it…

In reality, I have learned nothing about installing Arch, out of creating ten or so installations of EndeavourOS and at least five of other Arch-based like Archbang and ArcoLinux. Just tried CachyOS with XFCE and it came back with “pam session aborted”, austere log-in screen that wouldn’t let me in, so I dumped it. :woman_shrugging:

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A number of reasons - headed, of course, by the community. Another major factor was being excoriated by the Arch forum overreactors for supposedly not having a ‘Real’ Arch, when it definitely was a real one. Apparently what I didn’t know was that adding a repo was just as ‘bad’ - a habit left over from Ubuntu days. Also, having a friend who wanted to lighten my load a little (by forwarding a version of yaourt (yay equivalent) ready to pacman -U is somehow bad too. Didn’t need it, despite being impressed with the way they do OTHER things, and understanding the attack mentality with those pretending…

I have to admit I wonder how well they’d have done with the systems I already conquered along the way (TAMU Linux, AmigaDOS, CP/M etc etc)