 So a little bit over a year ago I made a long-term review of Endeavor OS and in that video I wasn't very complimentary towards this distribution simply because I had a lot of problems with it and some of the choices that the Distra maintainers had made just made no sense things like not including a graphical front-end for Pac-Man or some kind of software store all the way to the choices they made during installation to having a bifurcated installation process having things pop up during installation that shouldn't have been there all sorts of things just were Very odd decisions, and I just didn't really care for Endeavor OS now at the time I got a lot of pushback in the comment section of that video saying that basically What boiled on to Matt you're using it wrong well I've been using Linux since 2017 and despite that fact I've never proclaimed myself to be a Linux expert I've never seen a single time have I said that I you know know every single thing there is to know about the Linux desktop system Like I've never Actually said those words, and I have no trouble admitting that I will be an internal Linux noobs, so I Decided a year or so later to actually take a look at Endeavor OS again to see if they've made any improvements to see if Maybe I really was using it wrong And I have can do a better job this time and I have some thoughts on my experience So I'm not going to do a full review of Endeavor OS in this video I've already done that once and I don't think that I need to go through software availability or anything like that again Simply because none of that stuff has changed. It's still based on Arch You can still get all the software packages that you could get before Because it's based on arch if you want something that is in the arch repositories or in the a you are It's very easy to get all that stuff just like you normally would on any arch based distribution So covering all this stuff doesn't make a ton of sense So instead what I want to do is focus on a couple of areas that I had problems with the last time I was on Endeavor OS and I installed it on hardware So the first area that I talked a lot about in that video was the installation process itself now one of the qualms that I had was that the development team of Endeavor OS Bifurcated their installation process into a regular install and then a community additions install They still do that and I don't I'm still not quite sure why they've bothered and it's even more confusing to me this time because in The previous installation when I installed it before if you went through the regular install process The one that is main and meant for everybody they listed four or five different editions that you could install right now They have like seven of them, you know, they have Katie, Genome, i3, XFC, LX, Qt, Cinnamon And a couple others I think and you know like there's a whole bunch of them there for you to choose from and I like the Fact that they give you a choice, but then they have taken Four of them out and put them in the community additions BSPWM, OpenBox, Qtile, Sway and worm I guess there's five right now like the worm one I guess that makes sense because it's not going to be all that popular and maybe you could argue like Qtile and OpenBox Maybe you could argue about all of them not being that popular But the fact that they have seven of them already in the main installer and they've put four of them just off to the side Doesn't really make sense to me It feels like they've done extra work when they didn't really have to there now It's obviously not that big of a deal, but it's still something that still bothers me to this day every time install Endeavor OS It's just it feels like what it can't be because they didn't want the list in the main installer to be too long because it already is pretty long Adding five more isn't going to make it that much longer if you see my point So that's the first thing that I thought might get fixed, but it's not fixed It's still there not that big a deal the biggest complaint I had about the installer last time was that it was super slow and this time I'm happy to tell you that it's still super slow depending on what install you're actually using So if you're going through the main installer to install KDE or GNOME or whatever Those seem to be perfectly fine and they install very very easily now I have some b-roll for you of that installation process that I'm showing you now that installation did fail for some reason I don't think that has anything to do with Endeavor OS more I think it has to do with the mirrors being down or something like that I'm not actually sure why it failed but it had something to do with partitioning the second third time that it failed the first time It said Pac-Man exited with air code one, which I think is just an internet failure I'm pretty sure but the point is that the installation process is still mostly the same It still uses the Calomari's installer. It offers the Butterfest file system, which is a good thing for me I'm not sure if it did before I'm pretty sure it did and it just works fairly well If you're going to go through and use the regular installer if you're going to use the community additions installer That is still super super slow I'm not sure why the mirrors for the community addition are so much slower than the regular ones That's another reason why I think if they combine them it would be better simply because then The community additions could use the mirrors for the rest of them And it would just be faster because Somewhere along the line the mirrors for those community additions are still just really really slow now It's just possible that the you know I'm I mean I live in a weird place far away from those mirrors maybe and that's the reason why it's slow for me It's possible that you could have a different experience depending on where you live So that's still something that I noticed and it was not a fantastic experience Now the install that I did get to work. I installed the XFC version I've been using it now for a couple days and the overall experience is the same as it was before and I don't think that that is necessarily a bad thing one thing that I will say though is that Stability of it has been very very good over the court. I mean granted I've only been using it for two days, so I can't say like it's gonna be stable long-term or anything But I will say that I didn't have any problems installing this version of Endeavor OS and for the most part is just worked fairly well So one of my complaints before when I use Endeavor OS was the lack of a gooey front-end for software now I still Think that this is a weird decision on their part. They have Deliberately chosen not to actually include a gooey front-end for software and it doesn't seem to matter which version of their Distro that you actually install so if you install the genome version or the Katie version the there doesn't seem to be a front-end for Software no matter which one you use now I would Still argued that the stated purpose of Endeavor OS at least that I've always heard was that this is a User-friendly version of arch a new user-friendly version of arch and if that's still the case it still seems Pretty weird that they don't have a gooey front-end for software now now that I've used Endeavor OS again I don't know that I would change my mind on that opinion But I would say that it's not as big of a deal as I made it in the previous video Simply because now the arch install is a thing and you can easily install arch using a script I think that a lot of people have been doing that and if they have done that and they still come to Endeavor OS This is still a more user-friendly Way of getting to arched and the arch install script is simply because it has a you know a gooey installer It has a welcome app. You can use it to install software post Install if you wanted to go through and do this You can there's a whole bunch of software that you can install post install and it's not the prettiest application that you're ever going to see But you know it does offer that capability So I don't think it's as big of a deal as I used to I do think that Some form of gooey software front-end would be good like they make like Pamac is an option I do think but I know that the Manjaro devs who to Maintain Pamac aren't that great. They've done many things wrong in the past So maybe that's the reason why nobody wants to rely on Pamac But there are other options, you know go home softwares here discover could be a possibility for some things You could use like octopi or something like that if you wanted to confuse the hell out of everybody So, you know there are options out there if you wanted to include a gooey front-end for Software but the fact that they don't at all just still seems a little bit weird to me But I don't think it's as big of a deal as I did before now during my usage over the course of the last two days One of the things that I've kind of realized is that the more that I use this the more that it does remind me of Antrigos back in the day now. I think still the Antrigos Like if you don't know Antrigos was an ArchBase distro back when ArchBase distros were really important because Arch was not easy to install Franted it wasn't done too hard to install or Linux from scratch But it was definitely a process that wasn't new user friendly and ArchBase distros had a purpose at that point in that they made Arch easily accessible for new users It's not really the same thing these days because of Arch install because there are so many ArchBase distributions They're also Arch installers that you could that install Arch Linux But with a gooey front-end, you know, there are many different options nowadays so that it doesn't hold as much weight But back then Antrigos was one of the very first ArchBase distributions that would install a ArchBase distro With a gooey front-end. So Antrigos created their own gooey installer that is still around in a couple different Install distributions today. I believe I think some people still use it But you know, they created their own installer They had their own look and feel and they made Arch very very easy to install But what they didn't do was go too far and make it Manjaro, you know I mean, they didn't go through and have their own repositories. They didn't and they didn't have, you know, their own Multiple versions and stuff like that. They didn't have all the extraneous fluff that like Manjaro puts into it You know, it just wasn't that it was meant to be a very Non-opinionated version of Arch Linux and they succeeded there for a while until they decided not to do their distribution anymore Endeavor OS reminds me of that more now than ever before now, obviously, I've done some theming here I've just kind of removed some of the purple from their stock theme and just kind of went into a more base system, but overall The the XFC version at least does a really good job of just kind of working out of the box Nothing freely nothing extraneous There aren't a ton of pre-installed applications that you have to deal with You know outside of a few endeavor OS applications that they add that you could easily delete They're you know includes Firefox. It doesn't have Thunderbird. It doesn't have four different media players It doesn't have LibreOffice none of that stuff, right? Everything that you want to install you're gonna have to install yourself and to me That's the way to do an art space distro And I don't think that I properly appreciated that the last time I did an endeavor OS video because I thought at that point That if you wanted to create an art space distro You had to do something special that you you had to do something to make yourself stand out amongst the crowd of Art space distros and I don't think that that I don't really feel that way anymore I don't feel that you have to do anything special to make your distribution stand up because there's no way for you Could possibly stand out anyways In fact, I think you probably stand out more if you do go the minimal route and just allow people to Set their distribution up the way they want once they've had it installed I think that that kind of stands out more than the million other distros out there that do a ton of Customization in terms of theming again, I don't mind the theming stuff But obviously if you're a distributor and you do a lot of theming, that's fine But it's more that the installing a ton of applications like I've tried a ton of distributions over the course of this channel and a lot of them are blatantly for the developers right they've installed all of the Browsers that they want like the last one that I looked at I think it was snail Linux, right? I think that's the last one I made a video on and That had like six or seven different Browsers on there all of them really old right and I didn't get it right it turns out it was for penetration testing or something like that And I just didn't understand but the point is is that you could tell that the Software selection that they had on that distro and many others was because that's what the developer wanted on there Right it's what they use so they included on there And they made a distribution for themselves and there's nothing wrong with that But they're all like that right the vast majority of distributions except outside of the main ones do feel like they were made just for one person They've all made they've all made their selection of software based on the things that they're going to use and That means that if you wanted to use that distro And you wanted to keep your your system fairly minimal or you didn't want all that stuff You'd have to go through and install it endeavor OS has done a pretty good job of just including the essentials There's a media player, you know, there's Firefox and that's basically it There's not a lot of extra stuff here, you know, there's there's a image viewer so you can Browse an image. They've included meld. That's about the only Development centric one that they added that most people probably are never going to use icon browser I believe is a dependency of Xfce So that's probably was installed with Xfce package and everything else here is all Xfce Fair for the most part, you know, the screenshot tool calculators gonna be something that they added, you know But everybody needs needs that archive manager and balky name and Thunar are all part of the same package So they've done a good job of making minimal and like I said, that's not something that I appreciated a year ago When I talked about endeavor OS, I still think that the Installation needs some work. I think that if they just combined all of the additions into one I think it'd be better or if they made like a drop-down or something like that because Calamari's does support drop-downs inside of their list system So you could create a drop-down of the community additions inside of the main installer and that would work They also need to figure out why the Community additions are so much slower to install and the rest of them That is a problem that has been going on for much longer than just the year that I've been paying attention to it So that is my brief Revisit of endeavor OS and I do think that I have a more positive outlook on it now Then I did a year ago simply because My outlook on ArchBase distros have kind has kind of changed No longer does an ArchBase distro need to exist simply to make Arch easy to install because Arch is now easy to install I've talked about this in a recent video being easy to install is no longer a reason to create an ArchBase distros so a lot of distributions have had to Overthink their existence just a little bit. They've had to create other reasons for their distros to make sense I don't think that endeavor OS has done that. They're still just an ArchBase distro that makes Arch Easy to install or different to install in this case, right? It's just a gooey front-end for installing Arch yes, it's called endeavor, but it's basically Arch Linux under the hood and They haven't overfilled it with tools that you can you have to you know use or not used and You don't have to go through and uninstall a whole bunch of software that you're never going to use It's just a very simple distribution that offers you many different options for desktop Environment or window manager and it just does a very good job It's endeavor OS kind of sits opposite of what Arco is doing like so endeavor went the minimal route They've just they just install arch and then let you get on with doing whatever you want with your distribution Whereas Arco and there's nothing wrong with either you know direction. They want to you know There's nothing wrong with either way of doing this But Arco has done the opposite where they you know have every window manager and every desktop environment under the sun It's all included in the Calamari's installer They have like three three hundred different ISOs that you can download or something crazy like that Not sure what the exact number is but if you look at it You can you know that they have a ton of different Isos and stuff like that you know that in their website has always been a mess But the point of the distribution if you just look at the distribution itself You know they have all the software that you can stall during installation and all this stuff You know they've tried to please Everyone with the software and window manager and desktop environments that they offer endeavor OS kind of the other end of the spectrum where they've they've made choices on what they want to offer and They've kept it as minimal as possible So two ends of the spectrum both reasonable It's just a matter of choosing which one you want to go with and then kind of right in the middle It's arch Linux itself where you know you you were pretty much on your own Even though it is now easier to install so that is it for this video if you have thoughts on endeavor OS You can leave those in the comment section below. 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