My 90 Day Review of EndeavourOS

I didn’t experience any bugs with the installation itself (in either the April or August .iso), I actually noted that the EndeavourOS installation was quite painless and even complimented the team on the work they did under the hood of Calamares :wink:

If you’re talking about post install bugs, then I would say it was a mix of both. Some were legitimate bugs I came across in my first couple weeks of use and some were on me not having a proper understanding of how various things work. I don’t ever claim to know anything about anything, but I’m here to learn and help others out if I ever can. That’s the beauty of an Arch-based distro like EndeavourOS is the ability to learn more about your system, while on other distros it’s all already done for you. Can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs after all!

Fonts and audio/video work fine on EndeavourOS. I only mentioned that for my post install process of things I like to do after, which include grabbing additional fonts and various audio/video codecs that I need. Please note that no where in my review did I say that these things did not work properly. Quite the contrary actually. For example once bluetooth was installed it worked better on EndeavourOS than it did on PopOS!

I’m not saying Gufw is essential in any capacity. It’s only something I do post install. Due to the nature Linux, it’s not something most users will probably need, but for certain users it is necessary. In this case to each their own :wink:

I edited the Grub twice actually. Once to simply remove the EndeavourOS theme and return it to the default black screen on white font, something I’m more accustomed to, and the second edit was to have the Grub select and save the last kernel used on restart as the default, since I run the mainline kernel for testing, I run the LTS kernel for general daily use, and I run the zen kernel also for testing purposes. Which brings me to my next point!

I thought the same thing! So I reached out and asked the community here what they thought:

The general consensus around here is to stick with the LTS, since it’s less prone to breakages. A lot of posts recently have been a result of using the mainline kernel and using the LTS fixes some of those issues. It’s okay to use the mainline kernel if your hardware is supported enough, but I’ve always had an LTS kernel as a backup option just in case as well if ever the mainline kernel causes too much problems.

Well, initially I didn’t plan to use the AUR, unless I had to. But right off the bat I had to. According to this EndeavourOS wiki: (click here), which is basically that in order to get nvidia/intel hybrid setup working with optimus-manager, I had to install gdm-prime (both these packages are in the AUR). So those packages were essential to even get my system working properly. For some of the non-essential, but optional AUR packages, I installed the Yaru gtk theme, ttf-ms-fonts, spotify, pamac-aur, pika-backup, gwe, tauon-music-box, and a few others. Some of these also have a flatpak equivalent, but I wanted to stick to Arch as much as possible, so I went the “native” route and installed them from the AUR.

Thanks for the questions! Hope that this was helpful and clarified a few things. Thanks for taking the time to read this; just remember these are the simple ramblings of an average Linux enthusiast :wink:

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