Plasma 6 with Wayland or X11 option and qt 6 ported Calamares, meet Gemini

Announcements and news
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Image by Smokey

With the arrival of Plasma 6 and qt6, it was high time to celebrate them with a new major release ISO. The road to Gemini, named after the NASA program that was a bridge between the Mercury and the Apollo missions, was a real journey for our developing team but they got the release in top shape with an endless perseverence in a relatively short time.

As I wrote earlier in this post, Gemini will be the first release without the option for ARM installations. We are still open for anyone who wants to join us to breath new life in our ARM project.

This release doesn’t affect running systems, if you regularly have updated your system, the core updates are already there. The fixes described in this announcement are improvements for the ISO and the installation process.

The Gemini release

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Gemini ships with:

  • Calamares-3.3.5 24.04.1.3-1
  • Firefox 125.0.1-1
  • Linux 6.8.7.arch1-1
  • Mesa 1:24.0.5-1
  • Nvidia 550.76-1
  • Xorg-server 21.1.13-1 (xorg)

New features and fixes:

  • Plasma 6 on both the Live environment and the offline installation option – The Live environment runs X11 to ensure support for all hardware and when Plasma is chosen as the installed DE, both offline and online options, Wayland will be the default, but X11 can be chosen as an option in SDDM.

  • We switched from Nvidia-dkms to Nvidia packages – The Nvidia-dkms was causing issues, like freezing the Live environment when Nvidia boot was chosen on the ISO.

  • ARM installation option is removed

  • EFI partiton is created correctly when “replace partition” option is chosen – A bugfix reported by some users.

  • Gparted is back on the ISO in addition to KDE partitionmanager – Gparted returned as an option to use on the Live environment, since several users pointed out that they were missing some options KDE partition manager lacks.

  • Welcome updater and eos-bash-shared uses Gnome terminal by default when Gnome is chosen – Our native Welcome updater and eos-bash-shared uses xterm by default on any DE, but with Gnome the console was unable to close the window. To fix this issue, the apps now uses the Gnome trminel app.

  • EOS update notifier is removed from the default installation list – Our native update notifier is removed by default. It still can be installed as an option after installation through our Welcome app.

Improvements to EndeavourOS apps and libs:

eos-update

  • has new options, more info with command eos-update --help
  • fixed for running in chroot

nvidia-inst

  • added support for installing a non-dkms Nvidia driver

eos-sendlog

  • added URL expiration support (current works with the 0x0 service)
  • added warning about sending sensitive data
  • fixed for running through ssh

added experimental support for the doas command

Gemini can be downloaded over here.

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Fantastic! Downloaded and flashed to thumb-drive. I always like to have the most recent on hand.

Many thanks to all devs for your work on this!

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I have a doubt regarding nvidia-dkms.

I installed endeavour os galileo. Do i need to uninstall nvidia-dkms and install something else or is it fine to not remove anything?

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:enos_flag: :enos_flag: :enos: :enos:

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Congrats on another great release. The only thing holding me back (still) from Wayland, is gamma control. Without it, my monitor at 144hz is a washed out grey mess. So it’s xrandr for a while longer on X11 until this is resolved.

Keep up the excellent work, - it’s deeply appreciated!

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:de: :beers:

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Never a need to change running system.
Regarding to the change from nvidia-dkms to the non dkms packages is only a change we’re done for the ISO to avoid issues users reporting with the dkms build while the install process.

User can still decide what every one want to use.

So no, please do not change it, if it is working great for you.

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congrats for your wayland/X11 option in Plasma at least. Hope this extends to other DEs eventually, but I know maintenance of both in a single DE is taxing.

I noticed this in my recent lxde install, too. not even sure I had the welcome window either. miss the notify-updater though. (Don’t worry, not asking, I will hit the search function soon–I know there’s ways of bringing it back.)

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Simply install it: sudo pacman -Syu eos-update-notifier

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…is the fact that Wayland sucks. :slight_smile:

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Congratulations to the team :rocket:

Gemini installed smoothly here :computer:

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I hear you… :slight_smile: Without gamma control, high contrast themes aren’t high contrast. I honestly think that given another five years, now that it’s getting more adoption, it’ll be on par with X11 for functionality. But at the same time, I’m not sure how all the tools you use would be ported over, - XWayland compatibility layer? Time will tell.

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Huge shout out to the EndeavourOS team. Peace and love to all of you. :v: :purple_heart: :100:

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Thanks so much from Chile. Just tested it this morning in my Thinkpad E440, it ran out like a charm.
Congrats for such an amazing job guys. Keep rocking :clap:t4: :clap:t4: :clap:t4: :clap:t4: :clap:t4: :clap:t4:

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Thank you all, for your hard work.

I really respect the time and effort you are putting into this project.

Time for another donation.

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Thanks @Bryanpwo :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:EOS Rocks!

As you may know I’m a total Plasmazoider! :crazy_face: I’m now rockin’ Plasma 6 with wayland. I am having a few issues with the GTK apps, as well as some lagging issues, but I heard about the Nouveau developer that works for NVIDIA now: he just added a bunch of fixes to Nouveau and is helping to get GPU’s like mine (GeForce GTX 1050) working better, and I always hope to use the Open source option if feasible.

I am looking at a better GPU and think I still will go for AMD to go better with my processor (Ryzen 7 7500X) and Linux in general. :face_with_monocle:

Any which way given how fast KDE is advancing, all I have to do is keep up to date and problems seam to just fix themselves! :exploding_head: Now that’s daaaaaang cool! :sunglasses:

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Sorry friends. I didn’t know this subforum existed, and I opened a thread in another subforum (moderators can delete it if they want):

I have the question that I raised in the thread I opened, but I will republish it here with your permission:

Hello friends.

I was looking for information about the important changes in the latest EOS Gemini update and I found this EOS website and saw these changes for the ISO:

https://endeavouros.com/news/plasma-6-with-wayland-or-x11-option-and-qt-6-ported-calamares-meet-gemini/

We switched from Nvidia-dkms to Nvidia packages – The Nvidia-dkms was causing issues, like freezing the Live environment when Nvidia boot was chosen on the ISO.

nvidia-inst

  • added support for installing a non-dkms Nvidia driver

But I’m a noob and I always get confused with Nvidia drivers.

Here, in the forum, they have always recommended me to install nvidia-dkms, apparently it is better for games and 3d, correct?

(I really don’t know what difference there is between the proprietary “nvidia” drivers and the proprietary “nvidia-dkms” drivers.)

But if I need to reinstall EOS from the official ISO in the future, and I choose the “install with NVIDIA” option, the “nvidia” drivers will be installed instead of “nvidia-dkms”, correct?

So if I install EOS with that option and then I need to install the “nvidia-dkms”, I have to install and run “nvidia-inst”, but the next time it will have 2 versions of drivers, “nvidia” and “nvidia-dkms”?

Because in the previous ISO I could only install EOS with the “install with NVIDIA driver” option from grub, I could not install with the default Nouveau drivers because the screen would go black and my EOS would get stuck.

But well, in summary, what I would really like to know, for EOS KDE 6.0, for my nvidia gtx 1050 ti, for gaming and 3D rendering, are the “nvidia” or “nvidia-dkms” drivers better?

(because there they say that they have withdrawn the “dkms” version of the ISO due to some specific problems, but maybe it is that now the “nvidia” version is better or something)

Thanks in advance friends!

EDIT: By the way I forgot to mention that the update works perfectly, thanks to all the members of the ESO team!

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adding gemini ai to it wen?

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no they will conflict:
conflicts=('NVIDIA-MODULE' 'nvidia')
So if you have the one installed and install the other it force you to remove the other in the process.

The difference is the way they work to install them, as nvidia modules are kernel agnostic aka… they need to be build against the used kernel to work. DKMS version is doing this for all installed kernels every time kernel updates automatically and locally, if you are using the non-dkms package it will be build only against one kernel and in case you p.e. install the LTS kernel, you will need to install nvidia-lts package to have the modules for the LTS kernel in addition.

The reason for having dkms package used by default is that it is in cases more fail proof.
In case nvidia package reaches the repo later or earlier as the kernel package … you would have a no-video boot… And yea if user install LTS kernel and not the needed nvidia-lts package it would be the same. But on the initial install process inside the ISO chroot the nvidia module build with dkms is causing some systems to freeze up, what is contra productive… causing an issue with the implementation to have less issues… not ideal…

You can simply install with nvidia option and exchange the nvidia packages with the dkms versions after the first boot into newly installed system… nvidia-inst have the option to do that.

I do not think there is any difference on performance between the two ways to get the nvidia modules into your system, the only difference is that dkms version is building them on your machine directly., while the non dkms versions are build on the arch build server and you download them with the package install.

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A wonderful choice, well in line with the philosophy of giving the user great tools right out of the gate. Gparted has successfully edited NTFS partitions with no data loss that the Windows Disk Management utility wasn’t able to handle!

Overall, seems like a very well-timed ISO release. Congratulations!

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