I’ve been using Ubuntu-based distros on and off for several years: Ubuntu, PopOS, now loving Kubuntu. I’m wanting to learn something new and have heard amazing things about Endeavour AND the community!
However, right now my Kubuntu system (desnapified) runs perfectly and everything is set up. I’m dealing with the urge to try EOS vs the “if it ain’t broke” mentality. I’m on the 24.04 LTS version and part of my motivation is that back in the day, big LTS version jumps sometimes caused breakages that just needed a clean install. Kind of the allure for me to try a rolling distro. I tried EOS in a VM and it seemed to run great for me.
For those who came here from Kubuntu or other Ubuntu based distros, what was your motivation and did you notice a big difference? Sorry about the long first post , I appreciate the help!!
I’ve used Linux since about 2003, starting with Mandrake Linux, I used Red hat for quite a while, as well as fedora, Suse then OpenSuse and ubuntu across many different times and flavours.
I use linux at work as well as my daily driver at home.
I settled on Antergos (the spiritual predecessor of EndeavourOS) as I needed certain softwares to be as up to date as possible, so the rolling release model suited me better than the staged release model, and, the AUR is so comprehensive that installing most softwares that run on Linux is very easy.
Having said that, if Kubuntu is working for you, then why change? The rolling model changes the ‘trauma’ of a big upgrade to a bunch of small cuts as you update. There is always update pain.
I didn’t understand anything atall about my computer until I moved to Arch stuff. If you want to learn, this makes alot more sense and it translate more or less elsewhere as well.
If you value to set and forget and just use your computer - maybe not the best jump.
It felt like my computer was massively “snappier” here.
I’m also a former Ubuntu and Mint user. Back then, I used the non-LTS versions and ended up reinstalling every time they hit end-of-life.
Manjaro was my first experience with an Arch-based distro, and I discovered EndeavourOS last year—happily jumped on board since then.
What motivated the switch? I got tired of doing clean installs whenever it reached EOL. I’ve been on Manjaro for 4 years and EndeavourOS for a little over a year now, and I haven’t run into any major issues so far.
As for stability: I make it a habit to check the forum announcements regularly for any breaking changes and known workarounds. I also avoid heavy customization unless I fully understand what I’m doing.
The community here is incredibly friendly and helpful—I’ve learned a lot thanks to the people in this forum.
Edit:
And another reason—I got tired of dealing with broken or outdated PPAs.
If it works for you and you’re still hesitant, why not make a dualboot for a while and see how things evolve?
If you feel good about your new rolling release model after some time, just backup all your personal data from both of your installation, wipe out your drive and go all out rolling.
I’ve been 10 years FOSS and the deb-based stuff is stable and the smaller knockoffs are even better than the deb/ubu big boys to me. But personally I could never roll with apt or synaptic…I don’t know why. So I never came from there.
But wanting to change routine and shake it up is Very Healthy to me as far as Linux and Learning.
I could install arch the ‘pure’ way that was not hard as they make it to be. community not what I thought it would be therefore things went over my head, I was not ready for it. When I found Endeavour well shit…
….Endeavour [and community] is a friendly face to Arch and the Arch Way and the Arch Way is terminal-centric and nerdy and you gotta do a lot of maintenance yourself and I love all of it. I like being a good steward to my OS and that investment in it to me means more than blindly using something. there’s an ethos and ethic here.
2 cents. You have a great first post. Welcome to the joint.
It is just what I’m doing here:
Be sure to keep your running system and prepare for a second one in additional partition or disk or somewhere.
Here this helps me to backup the other system - before any update or other change AND keeps me running and working if there are some faults in one sys actually (beware: the biggest problem is sitting in front of the device
And you are able to rollback as quick as possible if you have a full backup!
For avoiding the usual grub-stress I’m using rEFInd now and I’m happy with this.
P.S. My data partition is symlinked into the homes, so this is always in sync.
EndeavourOS made me find joy of using Linux as daily driver again after long a while, so I can highly recommend it. Although I’m currently using Ubuntu 24.04.3 I think EOS shines amongst Arch-based distros (and distros in general) by making jump into Arch-wagon pretty easy; for example installer is pure gold.
When running EOS I have had no major issues and been blessed with Machine Gods that I have had updates that have not broken my system. Chance that something may break is something that’s good to remember when dealing with world of Arch, but it’s not something that one should be afraid for, because these are only problems that can be solved by asking help.
I think the best part of EOS is it’s community however and I think that’s the reason why users of other distros hang around here as well.
So welcome to the community! It’s always nice to meet someone who finds EOS, but you can also hang around here even if you don’t end up installing it.
Is it possible to learn this power? Do you just symlink individual folders, like docs, downloads, etc? Also, I currently have my / and /home as separte ext4 partitions. I was planning to do btrfs with EOS to have snapper as a safety net. Should I create a separate empty partition and just let EOS install the standard BTRFS partition scheme or convert my existing EXT4 partitions to BTRFS first? Thanks for any advice you have!
You are free in any direction, but…
I have had to learn, that each system (that you install in your machine) wants to produce its own settings (~/.config/, grub-settings & much more), so I ended up for now to symlink ~/downloads, ~/documents, ~/videos etc. to my large data-partition, as this is real private and not sys-dependent.
Even my thunderbird is a critical piece… - Some systems use very different versions - so you have to take (more then) some care.
So I do not see a urgent need for a separate /home, it depends, how much you can / will ‘outsourcing’. And to share one /home for more then one system may be dangerous if you use different Desktops / Versions (-> ./config etc.).
BTRFS I never used, ext2/3/4 & xfs only…
Converting an existing EXT4 to Btrfs can be hazardous. Also it would need a lot of free disk space for the process of conversion. So have I read and heard.
I think your best bet would be to create a Btrfs partition for EOS. And if you want to configure snapshots which are bootable from a boot menu, choose Grub.
You should be aware, that each system tries to configure his own grub. This may give you some surprise…
Your Kubuntu, I think, did already install one grub-instance, so it may be better, you do not install an additional grub in your new EOS, but I am not sure, this will work and your BTRFS will be happy.
Hope, someone else can give better advice.
Letting EOS and its Grub to manage the boot process is preferable.
Especially since OP wants to configure snapshots to rollback the system from the Grub boot menu. This would need additional steps which needs to be done in EOS.
Also, “traditionally”, Ubuntu* (distros)'s grub didn’t produce the correct boot menuentry for Arch* (distros). This may have changed. It was long ago I had the issue.
Thanks. I actually just installed EOS on its own BTRFS partition without grub. My Kubuntu os-prober can’t find EOS install so I’m going to try your suggestion and re-install EOS with grub.
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