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 I am not a huge fan of how certain packages on apt are a few years old and outdated.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?
It’s a great distro but if you want to have more solid experience you could consider do these things
1- install LTS kernel alongside the normal one (especially if you use nvidia) because who knows what would happen in newer bleeding edge kernels .
2- some people like to use timeshift (I don’t use it personally but it’s recommended) and it’s better to make btrfs disk .
3- don’t use aur unless if there is a package that you can’t get by official repos .
Other than that I feel like it’s pretty stable distro and fast but please you have to consider doing these recommendations (from my personal experience)
I hope you enjoy your arch (endeavour os) experience .
Arch with a graphical installer. That’s literally all there is to it. It’s pretty decent imo
“Always configuring” isn’t what Arch requires. It requires you to be tolerant of every so often dealing with a bug or two. Currently, the Arch-packaged version of Waybar has a regression which prints fractional seconds when using %T or %S specifiers. A tad annoying, and I could fix it by switching to waybar-git, where it’s been patched. But that hasn’t hit my threshold of annoyance, as I bounce between Sway and KDE.
The grub issue was a bigger deal, and while I knew how to resolve it (liveboot → lsblk and fdisk -l got me all the info I needed, then cryptsetup, mount -o subvol=@, arch-chroot, grub-install) the EOS blog had a nice guide.
But the reason why I chose it? Firewalld and Pipewire by default, customizable welcome app, and pretty simple otherwise.
NixOS will probably fully convert me in a year or two, but I’ve greatly enjoyed my time on Endeavour.
I went to EndeavourOS with i3WM (from dual boot Windows/ Ubuntu) and have been loving the experience. It’s really helped push my boundaries with learning Linux.
