It has been already over two months ago since we have released the April release, so it is high time to give you an update on our plans and progress.
We’re almost closing our second year and we cannot say it enough, but we are still amazed by the amount of support you are giving us every day! Whether you are supporting us financially and/or helping each other out on one of our platforms, thank you so much for the success of EndeavourOS. It is mainly your tremendous and heartfelt efforts that allow us to welcome new users every day.
In the last three months, there has been a significant increase in the help we are receiving in development on our base system and growth in community projects to expand our choices on our ISO.
This was the part of community interaction we were eagerly waiting for and we want to thank everyone involved for assisting and developing for us, making EndeavourOS confidently go forward into the future. Your efforts are genuinely priceless and our love and appreciation for them are indescribable.
Addition to our mirror list
We are pleased to announce that our mirror list has been expanded with two new mirrors from the same mirror provider Freedif. The first mirror is in Germany and the second one is located in Vietnam and with the addition of the latter one, it will be easier for our South-East-Asian user base to have a faster connection. A big shout-out to Freedif mirror admin and owner Kari for granting space on the server, thank you so much for this.
The eagle-eyed amongst you might notice that our Indian mirror Ghead is missing from our list. At this moment the mirror has some technical issues but when the mirror is back up again, we will put it back on our mirror list.
A quiet birthday
With 15 July nearing, our second birthday is rapidly coming faster and this time we have decided not to celebrate it with a new ISO. The reason for this decision isn’t because of lack of time. No, it has to do with us going forward and sometimes going forward means taking a few steps back.
Don’t worry, I’m not going completely philosophical on you, so let me explain.
When we started this journey two years ago, we didn’t have any experience developing or maintaining a distro. As you might know, EndeavourOS was created on the foundations and groundwork of Portergos, an offline fork of Antergos that was created by Fernando Omiechuk Frozie.
Portergos didn’t have a GUI installer and after a short orientation, we decided not to invent the wheel again but use Calamares instead of the Cnchi installer. To make it work in the short time we took launching our very first release, Fernando simply made the redesigned Portergos ISO work with Calamares also with the upcoming net installer in mind. This part was also new territory for him back then and it worked with a very decent result.
In a simplified explanation, you can say that all our releases were based on that particular ISO with each release adding some new features or minor improvements.
With experience comes wisdom and this is especially addressed to Joe Kamprad and Manuel. Fernando has put down his active role as a developer for some time now, so our convenient fallback knowledge base was gone. It was during this time Joe, instead of just adding and patching our current ISO system, decided to redesign our ISO.
It is because of this redesign we are not going to release a new ISO on our birthday. At this moment, testing is in full swing and Joe is adding features in stages. We have considered putting out an interim release but it is too much work to revamp the old system since some of the new features already have been replacing previous scripts.
In short, it is a bit too early to release a new ISO with the improved system but Joe and Manuel are also too far up the road to revert back to the old system.
What to expect
Our goal with the new system is to keep the ISO under 2 GB and from what it looks like from the latest test results, that can be achieved. Joe is working with several moderators and community members to improve the install time and clean up the way features are implemented on the ISO and simplify the way Calamares works to install a system. To be clear, this is not about Calamares being faulty, it is all about simplifying the design of our ISO.
The next release will be released when it’s ready, but we can assure you that the wait will be more than worthwhile.
For now, have fun and enjoy your Summer…
