By Rockwallaby
Time flies when you’re having fun and that certainly goes for developing this main release, so in a way, I am sort of apologizing for the longer wait than we initially promised you.
The ISO development team and the community editions team have been working very hard to improve the EndeavourOS installation experience for a newly installed system. Perhaps needless to say but once installed, EndeavourOS keeps rolling, so existing users don’t have to install Apollo.
New features
By rockwallaby
This release has some new features on the ISO and after installation, we are very excited to share them with you.
New features and fixes on the ISO:
-
We changed the internet check not to rely on GitHub or GitLab and preventing a failed internet connection error in countries where either GitHub or GitLab is blocked by using:
internetCheckUrl: https://geoip.kde.org/v1/calamares - A fix when Xfce4 and i3 are both selected for installation – This fix solves the issue of double installed packages causing conflicts during install of the DE in combination with our i3 flavour.
- Community editions now install with their dedicated Display Manager – Instead of using LightDM + Slickgreeter as the default, the community editions now are installed with the best DM option for the chosen Window Manager. The DMs used are: LightDM + Slick greeter, Lxdm, ly and GDM.
- Different order DE option and Package chooser – Calamares now lets the user choose the Desktop Environment first, before going to the package selection page to install other packages like another kernel etc. This was done to provide a better description of each option and prevent the user from installing the system without a DE using the online installer.
- Fix to Firefox getting installed when not chosen – Thanks to the community we were able to solve this issue.
- Qogir icons and cursor is used on Live environment and offline XFCE4 install – Previously we’ve used the Arc icon theme. The Qogir icon and cursor theme is also available in our repo.
- New info button for customised installation – The button leads to a manual to add some scripts for a customised installation.
- Rewritten custom EOS modules for better Calamares integration – Pacstrap and cleaner scripts have been rewritten for a smoother experience.
- When using a custom user_pkglist file, those packages are now displayed on the netinstall page so you can confirm what will be installed
- Toggle log button inside Calamares – This option has replaced the terminal window that used to open simultaneously behind the Calamares window, to read the progress during install. Now, when clicking on the toggle log button, the info appears within the Calamares window that, when disabled, normally shows the slides.
- During the online install processes, there is now status shown below the progress bar to make it clear what is happening.
- Bluetooth is enabled in the Live environment – Now you can check if Bluetooth is working on your hardware if you want to run EndeavourOS, however after install Bluetooth is disabled by default. We have created a new Bluetooth button that directly links you to our wiki on the installed system.
- Compression is now being applied to the installed files for btrfs installs – In prior releases, compression was only applied to files post-install
New features and fixes on the installed system:
- FirewallD is enabled – Each Apollo installation has FirewallD already installed and enabled after install.
- EOS-quickstart – A new GUI app created by Dalto, who joined our core development team in January, that helps you choose and install the most common and helpful apps on a new installed system. NOTE: The selection of apps is coming from the Arch repo and not from the AUR.
- EOS-packagelist – This app replaces EndeavourOS-packages-lists and is an easy way to get access to the lists of packages used by each part of the installer at any time
- Nvidia-inst – A brandnew app that is a rewritten version of our existing nvidia-installer-dkms app. It is a command line tool that helps you install the mainstream Nvidia driver, legacy drivers 470 and 390 drivers. (Thanks to Jonathon) and several Hybrid set-ups such as Bumblebee and Prime. NOTE: This tool is still in beta, so feedback is appreciated. Our nvidia-installer-dkms is still installed and operational for that reason, although that app doesn’t install hybrid and legacy drivers.
- Autoranking hook for the EndeavourOS-mirrorlist – It detects and implement mirror ranking to the closest one when changes occur for the EndeavourOS mirrorlist, NOT the Arch mirrors.
- An addition to eos-rankmirrors – Received the addition of options –prefer and –ignore to prefer and ignore certain mirrors in the EndeavourOS-mirrorlist.
- Fix for the Reboot info message after update for Refind users – A fix has been made to show the reboot message after a core update using Refind.
- Fixed generated Grub code – Previously it was set to work with bash-only, now it also works with dash.
Worm, a brand-new Window Manager
This release is also shipping with a brand-new Window Manager developed by our community editions team member Codic12 and we are more than proud to present you this WM that was developed a little bit under our wing.
Codic12 decided to develop this WM to satisfy his need for a lightweight window manager that worked well with both floating and tiling modes and had window decorations with minimise, maximise and close buttons in any layout desired and that could run on a semi-embedded system like the PIZero.
Worm is written in Nim and is based on X11, a Wayland version isn’t in the pipeline in the near future, according to him.
It does implement most of the important bits of the EWMH and ICCCM specifications, so most applications should run just fine, and if they don’t, please feel free to report a bug, so he can try to fix it.
We’ll hope you will enjoy the Apollo release, to download the ISO just visit our download page.
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