EndeavourOS

Vorlage:Infobox OSEndeavourOS is the successor to Antergos, an Arch Linux based Linux distribution. It ships with the Xfce Desktop environment.

Beginning

When Antergos announced the end of the project on May 21st 2019, it left a enthusiastic and friendly community behind.

Bryan Poerwoatmodjo, an Antergos moderator, opted the idea to maintain the community on a new forum. The idea got a lot of support within the community and within a day Johannes Kamprad, Fernando Omiechuk Frozi and Manuel joined him to realise the plan.

With Fernando Omiechuk Frozi joining the team, the idea of maintaining the community on another forum, transformed to creating an Arch-based distribution with that dynamic and friendly community in its core, since he already created an Antergos derivative called Portergos with an offline installer offering a single desktop environment based on Xfce.

The original plan was to use the Antergos net-installer Cnchi, that offered nine desktop environments and a base install to choose from, but due to technical difficulties the team decided to launch the distribution with only the offline installer based on Portergos and planned to come up with a net-installer later in development.

Within a week the team presented the plan to the community and began developing the distribution, the website and the forum.

Developing an identity

When the team couldn't get the Antergos installer Cnchi working, they had to look for a replacement that offered the same GUI convenience a ended up using Calamares since it also supports a net-installer.

With the sudden ending of the Antergos project fresh in their minds, the team came up with a plan to create a distribution that was easy to maintain by keeping the repository small and offer a close to Arch-Linux experience with the convenience of a GUI installer. Since RebornOS, another Antergos derivative, already took the road Antergos travelled, the team came up with the idea to create an almost close to Arch system with the friendly and supportive community in its core.

This meant throwing preinstalled apps and packages, like an emailclient or an office suite out of the repository and making the terminal the visible heart of the system again.

This plan received mixed reviews within the community, especially the excluding of Pamac, a populair GUI wrapper for Pacman the packagemanager for Arch-Linux, in the repo.

The main idea is to give the user the freedom to create a system to their specific needs and getting to learn the system by installing the needed packages themselves, with the help from the friendly and warm community.

Target audience

With their new philosophy, the team has made a conscious choice to target a specific audience that either already knew Arch Linux, but wanted a fast and simple install, or the "distro-hoppers" who already had some Linux knowledge but wanted to explore Arch Linux without the technical install procedure of the base distribution.

By not shipping a GUI package manager by default, the team is convinced that the user will be more aware of what they are installing and therefore have more control on the installed system. It doesn't matter if the user decides to go 'pure Arch', use GUI apps like Pamac or Octopi or use sandbox solutions like Snaps or Flatpak, there's no judgement from the developers side. The user decides what and how the system rolls.

First release

On July 15th 2019, EndeavourOS released their first ISO, the team had in the back of their minds that not the entire Antergos community would follow them, but the response and the numbers of community members that joined exceeded their expectations. Not only did the community receive the first release very well, but several bloggers and vloggers gave it rave reviews, even shortly after launch.

Net-install

Immediately after the launch of the distribution, the EndeavourOS team began to develop a net-installer for users who do not want to download a large image file to install the distribution. The release of this is expected to be in the Autumn of 2019.

Discovery magazine

On September 11th 2019 EndeavourOS announced that they will release an online magazine to give their users some background information on Arch commands and to inform them on new packages to explore. The magazine named Discovery, like the name of the distribution inspired by the names of James Cook's vessels and the Space crafts of the Space Shuttle program, will be launched in November of 2019.