TL;DR
Fifty-ish software/devops guy in and out of Linux for 25 years coming from Manjaro → Antergos → Manjaro → EndeavourOS. I like symphonic/progressive metal with female lead vocals, Speyside/Highland scotches (Dalmore, Glenvilet, Macallan, etc), some ARPG games (like Soulsborne), and Ruby.
Long version:
Greetings, all. I’m a new arrival to the EndeavourOS community. I’m in my early 50s and have been using Linux off an on for around 25 years, since back in the day when Red Hat and Slackware were young, and Yggdrasil was still available. I remember getting Red Hat on a bunch of floppy disks, but back then, I didn’t really have a reason to use Linux, so it fell by the wayside.
Some years later, I had a friend who worked for a networking company, and he would give me their old Compaq servers that had fully depreciated and no longer had value to his employer. I set up a bunch in my garage and experimented with SuSE, Debian, and something else that I can’t remember. It was about this point that I started liking Debian, but again, didn’t have too many reasons to use it.
I later played around with some of the early Live CD distributions like MEPIS and KNOPPIX, and started trying to use Linux as my primary OS at home (the specifics of which are quite foggy and lost to the sands of time). I had been using (K)Ubuntu myself for a while, and then converted a notebook for my then wife, and all went well until an upgrade borked her Dvorak layout. This was circa 2007. It took me four hours of internet searching to find the solution, which took 2 minutes to apply, but it really irked me, and that’s when I decided to get a Mac. From then until a couple of years ago, I used Macs for my personal computer.
By day I am a software/devops engineer, and have been deploying software to and managing Ubuntu and CentOS servers for the past 12 years. A couple of years ago, I wondered if I could run Linux on my iMac, so I installed Ubuntu on it and rediscovered a fondness for Linux. After a spell with Ubuntu, I wanted something different, and eventually ended up with Manjaro, which I really liked and used for some number of months. But I have this thing about wanting to be close to vanilla, and later found Antergos, which I liked even more and used until the shutdown. I also like to use things that are actively supported, so when Antergos shut down, I went back to Manjaro, but kept my ear open for the opportunity to try EndeavourOS when I could install Gnome. That day came last week when I heard the net installer was available.
I spent the past few days running through the setup/configuration process on my ASUS TUF Gaming FX505DY, which I knew to work pretty well as I had both Manjaro and Antergos on it. I took the opportunity to tweak a script that I have been using the past year or so to install desired software after initial setup, so I went through the net installer some number of times. I had no problems with the net installer at all, and after verifying that everything worked on my notebook as I expected it to, I replaced Manjaro on my desktop yesterday.
I applaud the EndeavourOS team for their hard work, dedication to the community, and the desire to provide as near as reasonable vanilla Arch experience with easy setup. Well done! 
EDITED for clarity.
