this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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... and I absolutely love it.

After my previous post where I asked for advice on distros I have tried Mint and EndeavourOS first as VM's and afterwards I gave them their own partition and tried it on my real hardware.

Something about EndeavourOS just sat right though and I promptly replaced my windows install with it. KDE Plasma also blows me away with the amount of customisation that is possible.

I've spent some time configuring today but mostly aesthetic stuff as my hardware worked 95% out of the box. Some odd dependencies were missing for steam to work properly but I'm really not missing anything that windows had right now.

I'm curious how my uni workflow will look like now, but I'm sure I can make it work.

Thanks a lot for the support and advice you've given me. I really love the community on here.

I'll get back to customising my bash prompt now. πŸ˜„

Edit: Due to popular demand:

I use Arch, btw.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago

You forgot "I use Arch BTW" at the end of your post.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't use Endeavor or Arch (btw), but KDE Plasma is amazing. I'd probably be happy with any distro as long as it supported plasma.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Plasma doesn't just work on any distro? Does it have specific requirements?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I guess it might not be available in all repositories. I can't think of one where it definitely isn't though.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doesn't work on Guix, or at least isn't in the repos and didn't work at all some time ago. Something to do with the way Plasma expects the files stem to be versus how Guix implements it. Nix makes it work so it must be possible, not sure whether anyone's bothered to port it over yet though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh, that's quite interesting. It most certainly works on NixOS, considering there is a live KDE option, so why it doesn't work on Guix is mystery for me.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (5 children)

You mentioned customizing your bash prompt, I recommend checking out OhMyBash. https://github.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash.

Alternatively, zsh is also good, and a little bit more modern. I still haven't found a solution that uses modern keyboard shortcuts and text entry functions. Even zsh things like shift+arrows and ctrl+arrows are an after market hack.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

And the zsh equivalent Oh My Zsh

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm a big fan of fish personally.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This will send me down another 4h rabbit hole today, thanks 😬

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In case you're interested I've tried out a few things and kinda settled on fish, but will still use bash for scripting.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you are using arch, always rememeber that, do backups, you have your university things there

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

If you use a computer, make regular backups.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've been using endeavouros for about a year now, and if things stay as they are I'll never be switching. Like you said it just sits right for some reason. Easy installed and everything just works, all my games run great on it as well. I use the zen kernel but I dont think its mandatory.

Biggest advice I can give is set up timeshift....like now. Its a huge safety net and will let you play with things with out worrying

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

timeshift from the AUR, grub-btrfs from the repos to be able to boot right into snapshots.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

I've been using EndeavourOS for about 2 years now, it's a fantastic distro!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (5 children)

EndeavourOS is very solid, surprised that it isn't more popular.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've never tried EndeavourOS as it always seems a bit pointless now archinstall exists.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fair point. For me using a distro dedicated to making Arch accessible just is more attractive than having an installer and being on my own afterwards.

But yeah, EndeavourOS is pretty much just an installer with purple space theming.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

As someone who used both, endeavourOS gives you a good idea what a system should look like, it's not extremely overdone.

I did switch to Arch, just because i think that i don't need quite as much.

If i would have only tried Arch i would have spent so much time figuring out what's possible and what i want.

There is a place for it, not everyone wants to take so much time figuring things out and that's fine by me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I've used Linux in various ways since the nineties and know it intimately but I don't want to fiddle with an install. When I got my new laptop this year I appreciated being able to plug in an EndavourOS flash drive, click on a couple of things and then let it install a sane default with prop NV driver already setup while I made coffee. I was ready to play games from my old Steam lib SSD in 20 min.

I don't know if the Arch installer is like that but EOS is slick.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm looking to build a new PC (for Baldurs Gate 3) and been heavily leaning on ditching Windows for Endeavour. Or OpenSuse or Rhino? Some easy to set up rolling release. Considering Arch based to sorta match my Steam Deck.

Glad to hear everyone raves about Endeavor.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Endeavor is fantastic. For all the time I ran it, I never had any of the issues that people say Arch is riddled with: updates irreparably mucking up your system, packages making a mess of things, the AUR being unstable and dangerous. I've found that most of these claims come from people who are against the way Arch does things and have never actually tried it for any extensive amount of time.

You do need to be mindful of updates being pushed to your system (read the newsletters, they will tell you if anything in the update is broken and how to fix it) and have the technical know-how of how to fix those things when they do happen... And they will happen. That's any rolling release, though.

Personally I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for gaming, it was a breeze to set up and continues to be a breeze to work with. I love every second of it. But EndeavorOS is a very close second for me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Only significant issue that I've had with EndeavourOS/Arch is when I had a laptop with it installed and didn't update for like 6 months because I rarely needed it. When I went to do a full update, it really messed multiple things up. There were just too many massive changes at once. I just shrugged and reinstalled with the newest ISO, but if I had heavily customized it or something, I would have been pretty annoyed. Ever since then I usually install it with BTRFS and auto pacman snapshots.

Also, never perform partial upgrades unless you know what you are doing. That's apparently the fastest way to mess things up. I played with this before and it definitely will break things.

[–] LeFantome 5 points 1 year ago

I certainly do recommend keeping a rolling release current.

That said, I have successfully fully upgrades several stale Arch systems. The biggest issue is the out of date GPG and keyring. Once you get through that, it is generally cake.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

heard Garuda is good for gaming, it's Arch based too

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As far as uni workflow goes, I don't know what you do, but LibreOffice worked just fine for me in college for papers and such. Sheets is definitely inferior to excel if you're doing serious spreadsheet work, but Writer works perfectly fine as a Word clone for simple word processing. My professors never commented on it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

You can export as .docx too so it's a snap for windows users.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Hint: check out the magic of dotfiles on GitHub. If you enjoy customizing your Bash prompt, they’ll be right up your alley.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Is it like Manjaro without the bloat?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

A major difference is Manjaro has its own repos which has a tendency to break AUR packages, while EndeavourOS uses the normal Arch repos. Endeavour is pretty much just pre-configured Arch so it bypasses a lot of the issues with security and stability that Manhjaro suffers from.

IMO I still think people should just use vanilla Arch so they can customize everything to the fullest but EndeavourOS is a decent option.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I think EndeavourOS profits greatly from being so close to Arch, because right now every fix that worked for an Arch user also worked for me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh nice! I like Arch because of AUR, but I'm too lazy to go through the setup again, so I'll definitely try this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] LeFantome 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looking at that script, most of it is just changing what the OS reports itself to be and what themes to use. Of course, it also removes the EndeavourOS specific repo and mirror-list. Still, this script is a pretty good illustration of how little difference there is between EndeavourOS and Arch once installed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That was part of my reason for linking it, and also why I put "convert" in quotes. It really is just Arch pre-configured and with some themes and some extra utilities.

I actually didn't know they had their own repo until I took a look yesterday and not only is it tiny but it seems to be mostly themes, configs, and/or tools. I don't think they even have alt versions of existing packages, just additions.

[–] LeFantome 6 points 1 year ago

It is Manjaro without the break.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

More like purple Arch, but you don’t have to mess with your date/time because the certificates don’t break, and you can install stuff from the AUR without worrying about breaking your system.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cool, yeah it does look very appealing. Might hop myself. I tried to install it but I couldn't get btrfs to work on my system so I went with openSuSe Tw instead. I dont really like corporate distros though and I miss the aur plus the amazing arch wiki so might try again.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

In case it helps: At install time I created a swap partition the same size as my RAM and a Btrfs root partition. Then after install I ran
"yay -S snapper-support btrfs-assistant btrfmaintenance"

Then after install I enabled the maintenance scripts with defaults in the btrfs-assistant GUI and that was it. It takes snapshots when installing stuff and I can do a roolback to a snapshot in btrfs-assistant GUI or Cli (requires an immediate reboot).

One snag: If you installed it with Grub instead of systemd-boot it will show booteable snapshots in Grub but I don't know how roll back permanently if I've booted into one as it uses some sort of overlayfs. So I don't use this feature.

I wish EOS did all this as an install option though.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Congrats and welcome. If you haven’t already, make an account on the forum. It’s super friendly and helpful. I’ve been on EOS for about three months now, and it’s the best Linux experience I’ve ever had.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
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