Just installed EndeavourOS and the install was pretty seamless. My biggest hang up was choosing between btrfs and ext4 (chose ext4). Since this is a rolling distro, I installed Timeshift and Timeshift-autosnap (AUR) for easy rollbacks because I will probably break something. The KDE theme is tasteful.
I’m a long time Windows user since MS DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1, but I just can’t deal with Windows 11. And that’s saying something since I dealt with Windows ME, Vista, and 8! Windows 8 caused me to start testing the waters with Linux. I distro hopped off and on bet couldn’t cut the MS cord. I mostly used Debian based distros because I found apt pretty easy to use. I finally built a new computer (yes at these inflated prices) for Christmas and Installed Debian 13 (Trixie) and then upgraded to Unstable (Sid) because I wanted newer packages. That’s where I learned about Timeshift and autosnap combo. I wanted the new KDE Plasma 6.6.x and got tired of waiting for it to hit the repos. Plus I wanted to try a true rolling distro like Arch, but somehow I always ended up breaking something during the install even with the archinstall script. What drew me to EndeavourOS is the fact that it uses the actual Arch repository unlike the other “easy” Arch distros like Manjaro and CachyOS.
I guess this a long winded way to say thanks to the EndeavourOS team for an easy install process.
Great to hear you finally landed on the best Linux Distro!
I was running all Windows since Win 3.x(I did skip Vista and Win8) and when Microsoft announced end for Win10(and years of making Win10 worse) and the horror that’s Win11 i had enough and went full on Linux(EOS ).
I’ve been testing Linux since the early 2000 but never liked it(Debian) until I tried Arch and finally EndeavourOS .
I’m still not sure what I did to not be able to install Arch considering I was able to install Debian with their netinstall image! But I try to stick with base distros (Debian, Fedora, Arch) or ones that use the base distro repos and that’s what drew me to EndeavourOS
Hi @doomgaze1 and welcome to the forum, best advise I can give if you don’t want to break your system is to read the documentation, ask questions if unsure and when you make changes make small changes and take note of what you did that way if anything goes wrong it will be easier to see what may have happened and easier to explain what happened if you need help.
Thanks for the welcome and looking forward to the ENOS experience. Also hedged my bets with Timeshift and autosnap which is an awesome combo that takes a snapshot of your root and boot when pacman/yay make changes to the system for easy rollbacks if an update or package install goes wrong.
“choosing between btrfs and ext4 (chose ext4) for easy rollbacks because I will probably break something”
For a newbie, btrfs is what you need. rollbacks are placed easily in the grub at start. No need for manual interventions. if system is damaged, just start at the last functioning point. No need to recover anything.
EXT4 is for servers that need backups in different physical disks
BTRFS for root and EXT4 for /home is the way to go for newbies
Hi @doomgaze1 and welcome to the forum. The best advice I can give you for smooth running of Endeavouros is to keep an eye on the Arch news and make any manual interventions required. If you do that, it will be very reliable.
Hey! Great to havwe you with us! You can’t go wrong with Ext4, it’s been the old faithful for a long long time a reason I jumped full-time with Win8 after they decided through visually impaired users under the bus with their UI design that obfuscated menus.
You’ll be surprised at how much you pick up and how fat that happens, - EOS smoothens down a lot of rough edges that archinstall leaves behind. Enjoy the journey and welcome to the purple side!
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I jumped full-time with Win8 after they decided through visually impaired users under the bus with their UI design that obfuscated menus.