I made a post a few days ago asking your opinion on Manjaro and it was very mixed, with a slightly negative overall opinion. I heard some recommend EndeavourOS instead and did some online research and it seems to be pretty solid and not have the repository problem that Manjaro has.
Just for context I am a Linux noob and have only used Mint for about the past six months. While I don’t have any major complaints, I am looking to explore more distros and the Arch repository with its rolling releases. I am not a huge fan of how certain packages on apt are a few years old and outdated. However, I also don’t have the time to be always configuring my OS and just want something that works well out of the box.
Is EndeavourOS a solid choice?
There are people in this thread saying things may break in Arch based distros, but I couldn’t disagree more. From my personal experience Arch is very stable and since I started using it 3y ago it has been rock solid. When I was using Ubuntu I sometimes had to deal with dependency conflicts and missing packages from the official repo that was very annoying to solve
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The AUR also suffers from abandonment and dependency issues, sometimes blocking major upgrades.
Sounds like a perfect match for me.
I’ve been using it daily for about a year and I have no complaints.
since “archinstall” is a thing endeavouros is not that relevant.
I’ve been using it for a while now. It’s generally good. I’ve been facing random system crash issues during gaming or using Firefox or background steam. I have an amd 6800xt and don’t have this issue on fedora.
It’s great if what you want is Arch Linux and everything that comes with it. Things might break from time to time.
If you want something more stable I’d go with Fedora or Debian.
I use EndeavourOS and OpenSuse tumbleweed myself, and I’d caution you about using endeavour. It’s a great OS that I personally love but there will be manual interventions you’ll have to keep track of, and implement. Maybe twice yearly. Like the grub issue, or the repo migration for two recent examples.
OpenSuse tumbleweed however is a rolling release distro that’s more stable, takes little in the way of manual interventions, and is quite sleek out of the box. I use it as a work partition for freelance dev work personally.
I love endeavour, but it can take some more babysitting than other distros as it’s essentially just a really good graphical arch installer
How do you separate Dev/work partition? Any tool or just simple partitioning?
Apologies if I’m a bit ramble-y, I’ve recently caught covid.
Just a few simple partitions. I have one for EndeavorOS, one for Tumbleweed, and a third intermediary that I auto mount on both. That one houses a few applications that both need access to, I just added a bin folder before adding it to the path on both. As long as nothing there is system critical it’ll be fine
You definitly could get away with just two partitions though if you just want stability, and auto mount your partitions onto each other for ease of file transfer of you want.
it’s not really different than duel booting windows, and works quite well
I also have a fourth 70gb partition for a macOS virtual machine as that’s much quicker than a qcow file but that’s a bit much, to be fair
If you want something that “just works” any Arch base won’t be a good idea in my opinion. I love Arch but there will be certain things to figure out from time to time and for someone with little experience they can be tough! For you usecase I would recommend Fedora, that’s a lot more up to date but not a rolling realease and tends to just work for me.
It’s great. I’m on vanilla Arch now, but EOS would be my first choice if I ever wanted to change to another arch-based distro. The only time I ever encountered any issue (that’s not my fault) was the grub issue last year iirc. Other than that, it’s been pretty smooth. It’s basically Arch with a few QOL features preinstalled.
Edit: just like you, I was on Mint for years before switching to EOS. It’s easy, don’t worry. You’ll want to start reading, though. The wiki and aur are great.
It’s very good but as it’s Arch based, there will be some manual work required. If you want to try a rolling release without the fiddling, try openSUSE Tumbleweed.
I don’t really understand the need for it. I’d rather just use Arch.
I’ve used Arch on all of my systems for almost 9 years now. Installing it from scratch takes me 15 minutes, without any pre-existing configs, because I’m just familiar with the process, and what I want on my finished system. It works, and it works well.
That said, Endeavour is great. To me, it’s a no-bullshit Arch-based (important distinction) distribution, and the “sane defaults”, if you will, are reasonable to me. I don’t necessarily agree with all of their config choices, but that’s just to be expected on Linux on general.
I would definitely recommend this to practically anyone
As someone who’s used it for at least 3 years, go for it. However, it requires lots of configuration to get it the way you like it, so openSUSE Tumbleweed is probably the better pick for you.
It also comes with cool utilities like
nvidia-inst
(archinstall
advocates, write that down) and the community’s great too.You should prepare yourself to be the car enthusiast of computer users when thinking of using Linux at all, especially for gaming. You are the car but of computing when you dip into Arch based or other similar distributions. You will spend time looking at parts of the OS most people take for granted and can spend as much time as you want fiddling with tiny bits of the OS to tube it to whatever you want. So really it depends on what experience you want.