Second week after the stable release

Originally published at: http://endeavouros.com/second-week-after-the-stable-release/

![|632x355](upload://tfUxvNIVPuAelJztUL0EewXjv9c.png)

Monday the fifteenth is already one and a half week ago and I must say that the overall reception of our very first official release is more positive than we thought.

From my (very hot) place behind the desk I want to give the community a big shout out, the friendly vibe and the very large willingness to help your fellow members, especially to those who just joined our community is more than commendable. Thank you so much, because this is the Antergos spirit we wanted to carry on in this distro.

The media attention on our first release was also beyond our expectations, we never imagined that local and established writers, bloggers, vloggers and podcasters would jump into our first release in these numbers. So to everyone who wrote, talked or made a video about us: Thank you so much and we are taking your critical notes very serious for our upcoming releases.

On the subject of critical notes I want to clear something I’ve read on the forum or heard/read in the media on us.

The media often calls us the Antergos successor, this is true to some extent because this distro was born after Antergos announced its end and like them, we’re trying to achieve an easy to use installer for Arch.

Now our stable release is here to install and play with, it is obviously clear that we took a different road than Antergos. Our initial intention has always been to preserve the friendly and helpful community Antergos was known for. Being around the Antergos forum as a member and later as a moderator, I’ve noticed that a large part of the community members helped out by giving terminal commands to other members, instead of recommending GUI apps and most of the times the OP was happy to follow those instructions.

By seeing that often happen on the Antergos forum, I came up with the idea to make the terminal very essential from the start, but to have a small layer of convenience shipped with the distro. This is the reason why EndeavourOS doesn’t ship an office suite, an email client or GUI installers like Octopi or Pamac by default. By excluding those packages/apps we are not trying to be elitist or pretending to be Arch purists, (I mean we ship yay by default, that’s a big no-no in an Arch purist vision) but by installing those yourself with the terminal, we’re trying to give you a better understanding of what Pacman and Arch is all about. We made a very basic wiki article on it. https://endeavouros.com/docs/pacman/pacman-basic-commands/ (The wiki will be bigger in time, I’ll make a separate post on how to submit a wiki article)

Linux and specifically Arch are all about freedom of choice, we provide a basic install that lets you explore those choices with a small layer of convenience. We will never judge you by installing GUI apps like Pamac or even work with sandbox solutions like Flatpak or Snaps. It’s up to you what you are installing to make EndeavourOS work in your circumstances, that’s the main difference we have with Antergos or Manjaro, but like Antergos we will try to help you if you run into a problem with one of your installed packages.

Don’t forget that the Antergos devs ended their journey, because lack of time was the problem, by keeping the repo small we’re trying to avoid that.

With this in mind, we are positive that EndeavourOS is the perfect learning experience not only with Arch but with Linux in general. So enjoy this experience and every learning experience comes with making mistakes, don’t be afraid of making those, it will make you stronger and it builds up your confidence. like I said at the start of this post: We’re blessed with a terrific community to guide you through it.

11 Likes

word! @Bryanpwo

I do agree 100% here!

And again:
Do not be shy! Get involved in the development, check out GitHub, or write about mistakes you’ve found, something you do not like, or something you think is lacking, we’ll take you seriously and talk about it!

This is our OS

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Bryan, I’d like to congratulate and thank you and the rest of the team for the speed of production, the quality and philosophy behind EndeavourOS. You should all feel very proud of what you’ve achieved in such a short time!

I’ve used Linux exclusively since 2005, and Antergos since 2014. I was relieved to see EndeavourOS emerge after the end of Antergos.

I intended to wait a couple of weeks before changing to EndeavourOS, but my wife’s laptop refused to boot into KDE Plasma on Antergos on 11 July, so I replaced it with EndeavourOS beta. She’s pleased with it, preferring the relative simplicity of Xfce compared to Plasma.

I was also impressed, so did a fresh install on my desktop PC the next day, and have been gradually customising it to my taste. It’s been a few years since I’ve used Xfce and it’s been refreshing to use it again after many years of Gnome and Plasma. As with many changes it takes time to get used to it, a couple of times I’ve thought about replacing Xfce with Plasma, but will certainly stick with Xfce for now.

I fully agree with your philosophy of providing the basic essentials to install the system without any padding. The temptation to add extra unnecessary packages should be resisted. It keeps Endeavour easier to maintain and there’s a huge choice of software in the Arch repositories and AUR that’s easy to install. Good support is available in the wiki and forums.

Once again, thanks to all of you for EndeavourOS and I hope you all have time to enjoy a well earned rest after the past couple of months!

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Will try to translate the new article tonight.

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Take it easy, it’s hot enough in Europe :wink:

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I wanted to thank you so much for starting this distro! I’d been a long-time Antegros user, but whenever I did an install had to go through and remove all the bloat packages that shipped with it by default. I have a feeling this will be the perfect Arch installer for a great many new users, and long time users alike!

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