5d ago

Btw, I use Arch (via EndeavourOS*)

Hopefully this kind of post isn't too tired, but I figure it's my turn:

Finally decided to, after absolutely refusing to upgrade to 11, make the jump from Win10 to Linux! Been hopping around distros a bit and landed on EndeavourOS last night and I'm really enjoying it so far.

It's definitely tinkery and took me like 2 hours just to get my push to talk working in Discord (mostly due to my own lack of knowledge), but I love the level of control of everything you have (was on Pop!_OS before 🤮, edit: no hate, just wasn't for me!)

There's definitely never been a better time to switch and I'm very excited for when I inevitably brick my shit and come back here for help, so thanks in advance everyone! :)

71 comments

You can't say you use Arch unless you use Arch. Also, you are also saying it all wrong. It's "I use Arch, BTW" not "BTW, I use Arch". You would know that if you used Arch. Have I mentioned I use Arch, BTW?
- endeavouros isnt a real os, its basically just an arch installer with persistent theming and some pointless additional packages (the welcome application and stuff like that)

EndeavourOS club! Gorgeous blend between granular control and reasonably configured initial guardrails for a willing-to-learn new Arch user.
I played around with other distros too, before settling into this one. Haven’t looked back after 2-3 years of use so far.

Don't hate on pop. They have done nothing wrong, at most it didnt sit you right
- Absolutely agree, edited post. Was meant as a joke, clearly wasn't in good taste and I apologize. It's pretty solid, just not for me.
  
  I appreciate the edit 👍

Clicked in this post because of the wallpaper.
Stayed here for the polemic.
Searching the wallpaper, now.
- in case you haven't found it yet
- Jist install EndeavourOS. You'll get the wallpaper and the best distro to boot.

I've been hopping between different distros since 2023, but every time I come back to EndeavourOS, this distro seems to work the best for me, haven't had any problems with this distro.

I've been using EndeavourOS for awhile now and it's really good. Everything more or less just works.

Yea im about to switch myself. Been looking at suggestions and stuff, probably gonna start with Mint myself.
Many different sources advise putting it on a flashdrive first and loading from there, to start. Make sure I like it.
But the end goal, eventually, would be to remove windows from the comp entirely, right? Eventually installing my chosen distro as the OS on the computer itself? Does that sound about right?
- For me, I've been throwing distros on a spare SSD so I could test run in a proper install, but I'm sure a thumbdrive would be fine. Just keep in mind that you might get some hangs and things will be slower due to the speed of the drive, rather than the inefficiencies of the OS you end up on. If you want to test out specific programs or games or something, you can always do what I did and put them on a separate faster storage drive (I'm on SATA SSD for my OS right now, but am putting other things on NVME).
  As I mentioned elsewhere, I still have my Windows on another drive so I can boot to it if I need to, but I honestly haven't needed to even once since switching, so I'll probably end up just switching to VM only for anything that requires Windows fairly soon here.
  The transition has been much simpler and smoother than I ever had imagined.
  
  Thanks. I did read that from the boot drive it would be slower, and missing some features. Im looking to go slow so thats fine by.
  You kept windows on another drive, like a hard drive in the comp? Or a thumb drive?
  Glad to hear the transition was smooth. That seems to be the general opinon. Its just sometimes reading conversations between people who have been on linux awhile, or maybe work in IT or programming, I get a little nervous. Kernals and directories and other things that I know are words but have no idea what the mean in the computer world.
- yes

Welcome to your GNU/Linux jounery.
Before you distro hop again, take your time exploring the os and terminal it will make installing the real arch linux easier.
- EndeavourOS is the real Arch, with some additional repos and some sensible defaults.
  
  What makes an Arch system an Arch system is the repos, the package manager and the fact that you installed it yourself.
  Anyone giving you support will expect you to be able to answer a couple of questions about your system based on the fact you yourself configured it.
  With EndeavourOS, even if you have the exact same repos, it still wouldn't be an Arch system.
  And now get off my lawn!
  
  Try saying that on the Arch forums and see what they think about that statement.
- No hoping needed anymore once you landed on a Arch base!
- I agree, but I must say that with the Archinstall script it's a breeze nowadays.

That's amazing! Why shit on Pop!_OS though? I've always liked it. I think it's definitely more stable than Arch in the long term
- Honestly, it seems really stable and works great, I just hate how...hand holdy it felt for me personally. I think the emoji was a little over the top. My apologies, haha. It's totally fine for what it is, and if it works for you, that's fantastic!
  
  Yeah, I don't love the aesthetic of Pop OS out of the box but with a minimal set of GNOME extensions I really like it. Which actually, is the case for me on vanilla GNOME too.
  I'd like to be an Arch person, but on the only device I've used it on, I've had some major breakages happen a couple of times. Took months for the issues to get resolved. Which honestly, as hard as software is, let alone OSes, is a great track record. Most teams could only keep stability specifically with these long/major release schedules like everyone else essentially does it.
- yeah; I also use Pop!_OS and like it. I'm curious about the reasoning here
  
  I don't think I've really seen it hated on much
  
  The only thing I don't like about it is being behind on gnome since their DE is a forked older version of gnome afaik. Especially for recent gnome extensions, it's not always the most amenable. But mostly even on that front it's workable
- Arch is plenty stable
  
  I think it's very stable for what it is. But I still had it break remote desktop, wifi functionality, and something about graphics that caused weird glitches in Firefox. These issues all took months to fix, each. For most tech savvy people it's probably stable enough but for the less common hardware, the only reason I could keep using and updating it was by leveraging timeshift. I would update everything, test if my issue was solved, see it still present then rollback. I did that process dozens of times.

EndeavourOS is great. It's as bare as you can get without opting for straight Arch. I bit the bullet on vanilla Arch a couple weeks ago, though, and am amazed at how easy it is to set up now.
Bonus: I can follow the Arch Wiki word for word without having to cross check things.
But I loved my time with EOS. I would probably still be using it if I hadn't decided to fuck around with topgrade while having no idea what I was doing. The lesson of the day was just update normally... its built in for a reason.
Edit: Look up Timeshift and ALWAYS back up personal files to external. There's a reason Arch is notorious for being unstable. Sometimes just an update can bork everything (still very rare, though).
- Glad you are enjoying Arch. I agree, it is no longer hard to install.
  Do you have an example of something in the Arch wiki that does not apply to EOS?
  I mean, I guess most people self-installing Arch are not choosing Dracut (though you could and the Arch wiki covers it). I cannot really think of anything else though.
  
  This is basically true. EOS is the closest to vanilla Arch that just runs a gui live with Calamares.
  The only difference is the bundled dependencies and packages. EOS sets a lot of those for you out of the gate. That's what I meant about cross referencing. Sometimes I had to look and see what dependency/library EOS used and then pull it up in the wiki.
  In base Arch you make some of those choices yourself, so you can just start at the top of the wiki page instead browsing to where EOS left things.
  It's not a negative thing. I'm just learning from the ground up on the wiki instead of jumping into the middle of things. For example, I had to go through and pick which bluetooth and sound packages I wanted and EOS has them sorted out for you. Small things like that.

helpful if you want to install arch without endeavor ☞ Archfi and Archdi - Two bash scripts for Arch Linux Installation by OldTechBloke
somebody on lemmy regularly posted videos of OldTechBloke while they're archiving the channel on peertube.
- DistroTube has a similar project going as well, DTOS. I'm not sure if it's actually up and available but it looks promising for a similar target audience. https://youtu.be/FA__ScVhGQA
- Interesting. I made the equivalent of this for installing Arch on raspberry pi 5. Maybe I should make them public.
- Why use this instead of just archinstall? I've been using Arch for many years but I have used archinstall for at least the last few years and it always goes smoothly.

Welcome aboard, I also first started with beginners friendly distro (around 1 years ago), Fedora is my first ever distro then I started distro hopping and landed on vanilla Arch, that's what I'm stick with until now

I've always sworn by Arch builds. Built one up from scratch back in college ten years ago, and this past winter I decided I wanted to try a linux box again. After a bit of distro hopping I settled on CachyOS, but Endeavor caught my eye too.
Shit breaks, but fixing it is a learning experience. Small price to pay in exchange for the customization it offers.
- Shit breaks but when it does there is a well documented wiki to help you fix it rather than multitude of vaguely related ubuntu forum posts
  
  Ugh I still run Ubuntu LTS on my living room HTPC, and generally it's fine. But on the occasion I need to fix something, I swear every seemingly relevant forum post is from 2015 or earlier. It's maddening.

I test-ran EndeavourOS for a future PC and like it. I am a Steam gamer though, so my work's cut out for me in getting it to work on whatever hardware I choose.
- Steam works absolutely perfectly on EndeavourOS. No tweaking or anything required, just install and run. It also runs just about any game I ever tried, with troubleshooting as easy as choosing a different version of Proton from the dropdown.
  
  Great news! I tested with a VM and no GPU except iGPU, apparently my issue may have been no Vulkan support. I'll need a new machine to fully explore it
  
  Another confirmation that Endeavour is great with Steam. However I did have to follow the Arch wiki to install the correct Mesa drivers on my new PC (Radeon RX 7800 XT), as without those the GPU performance was crap.
  
  Can confirm EOS works beautifully with Steam and has done for all the years I've used it.
- You just have to install steam, haha. I got CS2 up and running in 10 minutes 😝
- If you were a non-steam gamer you'd have a little extra work cut out for you, but steam literally runs natively

71 comments