KDE is undergoing a period of major performance improvements. I’m impatient to have them now and not in n+ years time. My choices seem to boil down to a OpenSUSE tumbleweed or Arch based distro.
I’m too busy to do the sadomasochistic from scratch Arch thing so was looking again at projects using an Arch base. After looking at distrowatch reviews and checking their respective websites, EndeavourOS seemed to be worth a gamble. I was particularly impressed by EOS’s community in this forum & attention to detail in guiding users through installation by way of an easily discoverable Wiki. Another good sign was the choice of the proven Calamares installer instead of some hacked together alpha quality home grown monstrosity.
Pulled the all in one ISO from the well seeded torrent very fast. Write it to usb with Etcher, booted up. I noticed again attention to detail : the Welcome app points you to the wiki to help prepare yourself with knowledge. I also noticed the Welcome has an ‘update me’ (or something) button. This updates the installer before you even begin installation. This is a very good sign of attention to detail and caring about the onboarding experience.
Interested to try the ‘online install’, which pulls everything from the repositories rather than the ISO, I opted for base + Plasma DE + printer support.
On a 1Gb FTTN connection it took about an hour unattended, went flawlessly and I was able to reboot into a fully up to date Arch based Plasma with full printer support.
On a celeron NUC (6CAYH) the system is very performant with minimal RAM use (~450 Mb). I’m really quite impressed with the polish and attention to detail of the EndeavourOS developers. Great job.
Cheers!