He observed few crashing on his system for the first time when he installed the OS. This was surprising as I had not experienced any issues during installation process.
He also pointed to lack of GUI package manager in EndeavourOS, is funny to read. 
How he can expect that he will find it by default in terminal centric distro. And he had focussed on looking for many GUI based managers, which is contrary w.r.t to default motto.
He wanted the the separate GUI for popular apps section from Welcome, and he referred to open this via welcome app as “hurdle”.
Though, just typing “W” or “We” and pressing enter opens up the welcome app.
He had not recommended this to newcomer, but many newcomers are using this(including me).
Apart from these, there were many positive points regarding EndeavourOS. These were present in past, and are eminent traits of the present. :partying_face:
He installed gnome by updating his system. Huh?! Else nice comprehensive review.
Edit: except all the strange crashes he had. Not my experience. Possibly because of having xfce and gnome installed together, or bad luck with hardware.
Something I noticed early on, after I’d fetched waiting updates and restarted the computer, my login screen changed slightly. Alongside the Xfce session option there were four new session options for GNOME. These were labelled GNOME, GNOME [again], GNOME on Wayland, and GNOME on Xorg. These sessions worked which was interested to me as I hadn’t knowingly installed the GNOME desktop, just a few applications and updates. It seems one of the applications, or one of the updates, caused the entire GNOME desktop, applications, and window manager to be pulled onto my system
Having GDM pull in the entire GNOME desktop and switch my desktop session without asking was, if not a bug, certainly an unwelcome surprise.
An unwelcome surprise!
$ pacman -Qi gdm
Name : gdm
Version : 42.0+r11+g4a52f026-1
Description : Display manager and login screen
Architecture : x86_64
URL : https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GDM
Licenses : GPL
Groups : gnome
Provides : None
Depends On : gnome-shell gnome-session upower xorg-xrdb xorg-server xorg-xhost libxdmcp systemd libcanberra libgdm
$ pacman -Qi gnome-shell
Name : gnome-shell
Version : 1:42.3.1-1
Description : Next generation desktop shell
Architecture : x86_64
URL : https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell
Licenses : GPL
Groups : gnome
Provides : None
Depends On : accountsservice gcr gjs gnome-bluetooth-3.0 upower gnome-session gtk4 gnome-settings-daemon gsettings-desktop-schemas libcanberra-pulse libgdm libsecret mutter libnma unzip
libibus gnome-autoar gnome-disk-utility libsoup3 libgweather-4 gst-plugins-base-libs libmutter-10.so=0-64
Ubuntu could be good for him since the last time I checked it had two separate GUI based package managers
yes he mentioned that also that he changed to GDM what was causing gnome-shell in…
I mean yes calamares crashes from time to time… nothing EndeavourOS specific i see it crashing on other Distros in the same way.
Could be caused by old USB drives used or badly written Image.
And key issues… or mirror issue happens on arch based from time to time.
All together nice review, but not much we can fix from our side.
I am not 100% sure about calamares could have some issues currently as we do a lot of changes and it happens that adding new features can bring in … new issues also
but may the review helps to pull EndeavourOS to a ranking it deserves more and others to a rank they deserve more
Pretty much any review that points that out basically makes the entire review worthless to me. It tells me they had no idea what they were trying to review in the first place.
It’s a fair criticism. Most distros DO include a GUI package manager of some sort, and Endeavour claiming to be terminal-centric but using a GUI installer doesn’t sit right with some. Still, the only place you need it is to install some things. There’s even an update button on the welcome app. I think adding a couple of buttons on the welcome app to install a GUI package manager of choice might be a good compromise. Not pamac, since I know the EOS and pamac devs have had some issues. Though that’s the first thing I install when I get the install done. 
That’s not to say EOS is great, I just think claming to be terminal-centric was just because they had to ditch pamac…but a terminal-centric distro wouldn’t necessarily use a GUI installer. I think they should source or create a GUI package manager.
I guess GDM assumes we want GNOME and pulls it in as a dependency and switches the default session.
Having GDM pull in the entire GNOME desktop and switch my desktop session without asking was, if not a bug, certainly an unwelcome surprise.
I’m not sure why it’s surprising that something explicitly called the GNOME display manager would assume you want Gnome 
You don’t have to use a GUI installer to install EndeavourOS. You can install it the same way as you would Arch, and just add the endeavouros repo.
So no, it’s not fair criticism.
The default is a GUI installer. So, it is a fair criticism.
No it’s not a default.
When you boot a live EndeavourOS image, in order to install the OS you manually launch a GUI installer. You can just as well launch a terminal instead, if you prefer a fully terminal-centric experience.
Wrong. Pamac was never part of EndeavourOS.
Clearly, the Kool Aid is flowing here, go ahead and enjoy. But people on the outside are looking at Endeavour booting to a GUI and a button to launch a GUI installer (and no button to launch a terminal installer, which makes the GUI the default installer) while claiming to be “terminal centric” makes people outside the established community scratch their heads. Accept it or ignore it, up to you…but remember the others that ignore “the people” (the GNOME guys for instance).
Clearly, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
It’s very easy to tell others what they should do, with their time, effort and money, even from a perspective of someone who has contributed nothing of use to the project.
Luckily, it’s also very easy to ignore such complaints.
That’s like me doing a review on a Ferrari and then criticizing the lack of rear leg room. . . Or seats for that matter. Lol
It’s not supposed to come with one, it’s not lacking. It’s not an oversight. It’s intentional.
Definitely.
EndeavourOS claims the installation will be almost parallel to pure arch with easy installation. Hence, GUI based installer had been provided.
Also, I don’t think Arch Linux ships package manager by default. GUI package manager for arch linux, pamac is default for Manjaro, not for the entire arch based OS. For entire Arch based and Arch itself, the default package manager is pacman.
But, EndeavourOS ships yay by default as well.
Also, if someone types package category/name in GUI, he is shown list of relevant programs, similarly, if one types the similar by prefixing yay in their terminal, then also they are shown relevant package sorted by their popularity and downloads, alongwith oneline description of the packages.
Arch doesn’t, very true. But Arch’s installer is also terminal based, so the idea of Arch being “terminal centric” makes a little more sense to those outside of the community (and let’s face it, anyone who’s already in the community is sold on the OS, the idea is to get people OUTSIDE of the community INTO the OS). And it is my opinion, based on over 20 years of experience with Linux distros, that saying a distro is terminal-centric, but providing a GUI install environment by default, can confuse people. Especially with the extra GUI tools provided by a default install in the Assistant tab, and the “Choose popular apps to install” GUI (both of which are not terminal centric, they use the terminal just as a backend), a mixed message is provided to potential users, who may be put off by a mixed message.
I’m going to press X to doubt. I’ve never seen anyone confused by that.
I’ve only seen people whining about the lack of GUI package manager. They have three options:
- not use EndeavourOS,
- learn to use the terminal,
- install one of several GUI package managers and deal with it breaking from time to time
Whining about it hasn’t been productive thus far, and is unlikely going to be in the future.
The reason why a GUI package manager doesn’t come out of the box on EndeavourOS is the fact that they all suck, and the EndeavourOS maintainers do not have the will, time, and resources to support users who will inevitably have problems with them. Saying “GUI package managers are not supported on our terminal-centric distro” is honest and sets up the right expectations from the users. Not confusion.
As per the website of EndeavourOS.
Also, EndeavourOS claims 99.9% pure Arch, but with easy installation.