 Endeavor OS is a very peculiar arch-based distribution. I'm gonna put that out there right up front. I've been using it now for a little over three weeks and I've used it on multiple computers now and I've installed it several times so I have many, many thoughts. Most of them are fairly positive thoughts. Like I've had a really good experience over the last three weeks for the most part. There have been some really weird things that have gone on that I don't know that are associated with our Endeavor but we'll talk about those. The reason why I say it's a very peculiar OS is simply because the development team is very opinionated. They kind of remind me of the Linux Mint devs in that they have made some choices that are a little odd. So we're gonna talk about those. We're gonna talk about the entire gamut of my experience over the last three weeks and I'm gonna see how much I can piss off the Endeavor OS community because that is probably the one thing I've taken away from my experience with Endeavor OS is that their community is very, very passionate about this desktop distribution and if you say anything negative about them or even if you say something positive about them in a certain way like in a tone that pisses them off they're gonna come at you. So I'm sure that this is not going to make everyone happy but you can't make everybody happy. So let's just go ahead and jump right in. The first thing we should talk about is the installation. Now the installation of Endeavor OS is very similar to what you'd get on many other arch-based distributions and there's nothing wrong with that. The Calamari's installer is very good. It's simple and straightforward and it continues to improve. There are now options to choose between EXT4 and ButterFS and it's just a very simple, very well-designed installer that I have no complaints about. The only negative thing I would have to say about the installation of Endeavor OS itself is that depending on what version of Endeavor OS that you're installing, it's going to be very slow. Now this is not across the board. The KDE version which is what you're seeing me install now in the B-roll actually was very fast and that was even using the net install where it would download packages directly from the internet instead of using those that are residing on the ISO itself. The KDE version was very fast but the version that I installed on my main machine was the Qtel version and that was actually quite slow. It took probably close to 20 minutes for it to actually install and that was after updating the mirrors so I'm not exactly sure why the community additions seemed to be slower to install than the official versions. In terms of desktop environment and window manager options there are a ton of them. There are several that are officially supported and I applaud them for giving those out and allowing people to choose which one you want. When you compare this to something like ARCO where they have a ton of different ISOs and it gets very confusing, the Endeavor OS ISO is very simple. They offer one you can go through and download whatever desktop environment or window manager you want that they offer. They have, like I said, they have several that are official and they have a few community additions that are easy enough to get to. I don't understand why the community additions aren't just right inside the regular installer. They seem to have two different versions of the installer and you choose which one you want to use based on a button in the welcome screen. I wish they would just combine those. It seems like it would be simpler but that's not a huge deal. Other than that the installation process was as you'd expect. The only thing, other thing I would say is that the weird terminal that opens up in the background is, like I said, weird. I don't know why that's there. As a nerd, I appreciate it. I think it's cool but for most regular people it's probably just going to confuse them. So I would get rid of that. It's not necessary or maybe give an option where it's hidden by default and you can bring it up if you wanted to look at it if you want but by default having it come up it probably would just confuse people that have never used the system before. That's just my opinion. Okay, so moving to the out of the box experience. Now I chose in the B-roll that you're seeing the KDE version but I'll talk about the Q-Tile version as well. The KDE version is very much a stock KDE experience. There's not a lot of customization on Endeavor's part and there's nothing wrong with that. If you want a stock KDE experience this is a very good one. It uses the Breeze theme. It uses the Breeze icon theme and it's just very good and it's a great starting off point for anybody who wants to use KDE Plasma. There's nothing here to complain about. Now the Q-Tile version was less good if I can say that. It's not necessarily that it was bad. It's just that it was not customized in a way that I found pleasing. It had a really big bar. There was a button up there that did brought up a menu that was centered. It was a weird experience and maybe it's just because I'm not used to using Q-Tile that way I usually have a thinner bar and it's a little bit less garish in terms of its design. I would say, I don't think that's really the right word that I'm looking for but the design of the Q-Tile version just did not please me. And as you'll see when we go to actual footage of what I'm using right now I switched away from Q-Tile and just installed i3. And I did that simply because I did not care for the way Q-Tile looked and I don't enjoy racing Q-Tile as much as I enjoy racing other window managers. So I just decided to move to something different. In terms of pre-installed software there's not a lot here. There's several KDE inspired applications, the K-Apps if you will. They did not include the entire suite of K-Apps. So thank you Endeavor for that. We really don't need the entire K-Suite of applications. Most of them are things that nobody is ever going to use. So they've just included the steak and potatoes of that suite I would say. And it's really good, right? That's what you'd expect. They do have a couple Endeavor OS specific applications in there but they're pretty nerdy and not anything most people would probably even use. It definitely doesn't have the selection of dedicated and customized tools that something like MX had but we really can't compare those. And it really probably doesn't even need those things. How they're not doing anything here that's weird like MX does where they're using a different internet system and all that kind of stuff. So there are two other things I should say about pre-installed software. First of all, the welcome screen does have some capabilities when it comes to installing software. If you'll see in the B-roll there, one of the tabs there will give you the option of installing something like a library office and a couple of other things. But if you click on the buttons that say Browse All Packages or Browse All Community Packages and Browse All AUR packages, all those buttons do is take you to the website where the ArchWiki will list out all the packages that are available in those repos. It doesn't take you to a software store. It doesn't take you to Pamac. It doesn't take you to Discover. None of that stuff. Those buttons just take you to the website. Now, that's the other thing that I will say about this is that if you're looking for a GUI installer of software, there isn't one. It just does not exist. And if you do any research on why that is the case, they talk about how Pamac screwed over Antigosh and was broken up stream. And that's the reason why Antigosh died. And it seems like a bunch of GUI for me, but that's just whatever. I understand why you wouldn't want to choose to include Pamac. Pamac is a Manjaro project, as far as I'm aware. So not including that makes sense, but why they didn't include Discover, I don't actually know. Like Discover is not a application that is controlled by a distribution that would be considered a rival. It's developed by the KDE organization and it has gotten better. It's not fantastic, but at least it would be something. As it is right now, as far as I'm aware, the only way you can go through and actually install software on Endeavor is in the terminal. And while that's not a problem for you and me, probably for most people who are somewhat new to the Arch ecosystem, maybe they don't know how to install software in the terminal. So that is one decision that I just really don't understand. Maybe it's possible that they've included a graphical installer in other desktop environments. So maybe GNOME software is available on the GNOME version. I don't know, I didn't try the GNOME version. I did go to the website and do some research and it seems that they don't include a graphical software center across the board in all their versions. And like I said, that is just a very curious decision. It's not something that I would have chosen to do, especially given when you're trying to make Arch easier. That's the whole purpose of Endeavor OS is they're trying to make a version of Arch that is as close to vanilla Arch as they can, but make it easier for people who aren't necessarily interested in using the Arch installer to install Arch. Hi there, editor Matt here. And I'm in the future. I just wanted to talk a little bit about this whole terminal thing before we move on to the rest of the long-term review. And I've done a little bit more research on Endeavor OS afterwards because this whole not including a GUI software store really kind of confused me. So I went and looked and I did some more reading and it turns out that they have described themselves as a distro-centric distribution. And this really confuses me. So this really has nothing to do with the review or the distro itself. It's more of the decisions that the developers have made. And it's an okay decision, but it confuses me because from the way I understand it, Endeavor is meant to be an Arch-based distribution that is as close to Arch as possible, but is easy to install. And the reason why you'd want that is simply because you are a new user to Arch Linux and perhaps you don't know how to install Arch Linux or you don't want to go through the hassle or whatever it is. If you're that type of person, you're probably also the type of person who installs their software through a GUI storefront or a GUI application. And these two things don't jive. The reason behind Endeavor existing being an easy Arch-based distro to install and not having a GUI package manager doesn't really fit together in my opinion. So I just wanted to kind of cut in here and talk a little bit about that because it just, it's one of those things, it's one of those things that kind of get in your mind when you're thinking about Endeavor, because it just kind of doesn't make sense. The two things just don't go together. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad thing. It's fine. It's more that it doesn't make sense when you think of them together, if that makes sense. So it can't be, it really, it doesn't really feel like it can be both. It really can't, it doesn't feel like it can be both a distribution that is easy for beginners in Archland and then not also, and also be a terminal-based distro. Like those two things don't feel like they go together. So that's the reason why I found myself might only confuse it. There's not a GUI package manager somewhere on here. Even if it's just discover, like I said, it feels like discover should have at least been there. So back to the video. So that was a really weird decision on their part, but it's their distribution that can do whatever they want. I just wouldn't particularly have chosen that decision. Anyways, moving on to installing updates. Now, this is an ArchBase distribution. Installing updates was, as you would expect, you get into a terminal, you do sudo pac-band-s-y-y-u and it installs updates. There's not a lot here. I did notice that they have customized it a little bit so that if you get done with an update, you get a DUNCE notification or a notification of some kind saying you should restart your computer. That was really nice. Other than that, it was just updating an ArchBase system in the terminal. That's as far as I'm aware that's the only way you can do it. If you're updating the system upon first boot, there is a button in the welcome screen where it will update the system for you, but that just opens up a terminal. It doesn't open up any custom application to update the system. Again, not a big deal, but again, just keep in mind, if you're going to use this, you're going to be more reliant on the terminal than you would be in other ArchBase distributions that include some kind of graphical way of updating and installing software. So I really already talked about installing software, so I'm not gonna harp on this too much more, but if you're installing software, you're gonna do so from the terminal and other than that, software availability was fairly good. Now, this is another place where I had some problems, but I'm not sure that this is an endeavor problem and not an AUR problems. So I encountered, so first let's start off with positive actually. It's an ArchBase distro. You have access to the arch repositories that is chock full of most of the software that you're ever going to need. If it's not in those repositories, you can use the AUR, which is enabled by default. I believe Yeh is installed by default. I might be wrong about that, but it was really easy to just install Paro, which is what I did. And because it's ArchBase, you get access to all the stuff that you'd get on any ArchBase distro, and that means that software is available to you no matter what. In terms of the problems that I had, I found that there were several applications that just would not build. So, and this was specific to several things from the AUR. Things like Tenacity, Audacium, neither one of those would build. There was a couple other ones, and the weird thing is that they were all built in C, like they were using the C programming language, and you could tell because I just recognized the errors that were there. And for what a reason, there were just several things that I just could not get to build. Now, I don't know, again, if this was an endeavor problem. It's very well that there was a problem with AUR and I was just having a problem that I would have experienced on any ArchBase distro, but I will say that both of those applications, Tenacity and Audacium, both built perfectly fine on Manjaro. They both built perfectly fine on Arco. So maybe it's just a timing issue. Maybe they were broken when I downloaded them now and they would just already be broken on the other distros as well. But I just wanted to point that out that I had problems with some things building in the AUR. So the next thing I wanna talk about is where I ended up in terms of desktop environment or window managers. So like I said, I downloaded for my main computer the Qtile version and the Qtile version was not to my liking. So I moved to I3. Now this is my version of I3. I did not install the I3 version of Endeavor OS. So I did not give that a try. I don't know what that's like. I'm assuming it's just a somewhat customized version of I3 and you'd go through and make your own customizations afterwards. That's the way it usually is. This is my version and my experience here after I moved away from Qtile was very good. I've talked quite a bit over the last couple of weeks about how I've switched to I3 and how much I'm enjoying it. I'm not gonna talk about any of that here. You can check out those videos if you're interested. But overall, my Endeavor experience of installing this and raising this has been very good. It's just been a typical I3 thing. I've learned more about I3 in the last couple of weeks than I've ever known before, which is something given that I used it for well over a year. So that was fun. The only thing that I really kept from the stock Endeavor experience is the ROFI that they included with Qtile. I really like this setup. Usually my ROFI is just a single line. I like that this is three columns. That was really nice. So I've stolen that and I'm gonna keep that whenever I decide to hop. Other than that, it's been very good. Now, let's talk about gaming. My experience with gaming on Endeavor OS was fairly positive. I was able to install Steam. I was able to install Lutris and I was able to install several games from both of those applications. I specifically installed most of my stuff from Steam, which is what I usually do. And you'll see some B-roll here of me playing a new game that I just bought. And you can tell that I just bought it. So I have no clue what I'm doing and I die pretty easily. But the point is that gaming worked fairly well. I did notice that there were some games that just won't run, but that's more of a Steam and a Proton issue than an Endeavor OS thing. I couldn't get CSGO to run, but I've never been successful in getting CSGO to run on my computer. Has something to do with my hardware or possibly the version of Proton that I usually use is Proton Experimental. I probably should do the Proton GE or whatever it's called and give that a try and see if that would work. But overall, most of the games that I tried, Cities Skylines, Spyro, Terraria, Broforce, they all worked really well out of the block. So they just ran. I will say that Spyro here on Endeavor OS ran way better than it did on Manjaro. I did not experience where my fans were like ramping up crazily like I did on the Manjaro version. It still got loud, but it did not get as loud as it did on Manjaro. So there's some kind of tweaking there that I highly approve of. I'm not sure if it's just, like it's a different version of Proton or something that was causing this to run better, but it did run better on Endeavor than it did on Manjaro. So that's pretty much all I had to say on gaming. Everybody knows that I'm not a very big gamer, so I can't really tell you that every game you're gonna try is going to work or not. I haven't tried all the games, obviously, but for the most part, it was a fairly good experience. Now, the next thing I should talk about is stability. Stability on ArchBase distros is usually pretty good. And a lot of people tell you, well, Arch isn't very stable. I never had any problems. The only problem that I did have was the traditional Linux screen tearing that seems to be something that is never, ever going to be fixed in Xorg. So if you wanna get past that, you either use Wayland or you do one of the many different fixes that you can implement in order to get screen tearing to go away. I just implemented one of those solutions and screen tearing has gone away. I haven't had any problems with audio. A lot of times I have some issues with pipe wire or pulse audio. Neither one of them caused me any problems here. I will say that I have had some complaints from people who have watched my videos and they've noticed that I've been a little quieter since I've switched to Endeavor. I'm hoping that switching away actually fixes that because they don't actually know what's going on there. But that might be a result of me having to use a really weird version of Audacity. And I should talk about that for a minute. Because I couldn't get Audacity or Tenacity to install and because I needed a version of Audacity that uses the new version of their file format, I had to build Audacity from the AUR so I could get a 3.0 version or whatever of Audacity. So I'm gonna make a video about how Audacity kinda sucks now but the point I'm making here is that because I had those issues with getting things to build, I had to use a subpar version of Audacity and that kinda pisses me off. I'm not really blaming Endeavor OS about that. I really don't think that's their problem. Other than that, stability was fine. I didn't have any crashes or anything like that. I did end up changing the display manager for my main computer here because I know for a fact that GDM and LightDM don't work on this computer. Every time I've ever used them, they just wonk out right after a certain period of time and they can never get into my computer again. So I switched to SDDM. In the welcome screen, you probably saw me when I was doing the B-roll for that. They do provide you with an option to switch between several different display managers which I find fantastic. Frankly, I would have just done what Arco did and switched to SDDM by default but that's not a big deal. That's just one of those things where you can change it if you need to change it. And again, the problems with GDM and LightDM are not endeavor problems. I didn't actually experience those problems on endeavor less. I just know that when I've used them in the past on other distributions, I've had problems. So I just switched away from it automatically. And the fact that there was an option to do so right there in the welcome screen was very welcome. All right, so moving on to community. This is an interesting one. So like I said at the beginning, the community and I have a history. So about three or four months ago maybe, I'm not even sure if it was that long ago, I made a video about the top five arch based distros and I had the audacity, the temerity, if you will, to put endeavor OS at number four. I think it was number four. It might have been number five. I know it wasn't number one because Arco for me was number one at the time. And it was an opinion. Those top five videos are always opinion based. Nobody's ever going to agree all the time on the positioning of that kind of stuff. But I made that video and there was a post in their forums that did not paint me in a very good light as I just put it that way. I pissed them off royally by putting them at number four. Like you made the top five, it's okay. But that's really beside the point. I went through this time, I made a fake account and I asked some very noob centric or very noobish, if that's a word, questions. And the response was fairly good. They solved my problems. They didn't do so in a very condescending manner outside of one experience. But otherwise the community support was very good. They have forums. The documentation for endeavor OS is really good. They have a whole wiki there that you can search. And it's actually a really good wiki and it's well documented overall. They do have a subreddit and a telegram channel. So if you wanna go and interact with them in other ways, you can do so. I did not take advantage of those options. I don't see like a discord option here but it's possible that they have a discord and I just don't know about it. They are available on Mastodon and GitHub as well. So there's a lot of places where you can go and interact with the development team if you want to. Their form is very active. So if you need to get help, you can go there and get help. So that is endeavor OS. My overall thoughts on it are that it's really good. I didn't have so many problems on it that it caused me to run away screaming after just a couple of days. I was able to use it for a full three weeks and enjoy my time here and really get a sense of using the system as much as you possibly can in three weeks. The thing I will say is that it doesn't stand out. Say what you will about Manjaro and Arco and Garuda. They all have things that make them stand out. Arco is very confusing but they give you tons of options during the installation process to install just a ton of software, a ton of different window managers. All this stuff can be very overwhelming. It's definitely not for everybody. Whatever your thoughts on it are is definitely a fairly unique process. Manjaro on the other hand offers a lot of choice and stuff like that just like with any Arc based distro but you can tell it's very based towards new users but they've also gone through and made it theirs. They've created a theme and all their main desktop environments kind of flow along those same lines. It's green and it's got flair and pizazz. Whether you like the theme of Manjaro or not you can tell they've gone through and actually made it look really good. With Garuda, it's quite obvious that they've gone through and had a very interesting experience with design. They've made it very, very flashy whether you like it or not. With Endeavor, not so much. Now I've only tried a couple of their flavors. The Q-Tile is themed but it's a community based edition so I'm assuming that the community has done the theming there not the Endeavor OS team itself. The two official versions that I've tried have been very met in terms of actually being customized. Like I don't need customization. It's fine that they, as I said before their point is to be as close to Arc Linux as possible. So what you're going to get if you install this is something that you would get if you would just install the packages straight from Arc on an Arc base install. And that's a fine thing, right? That's not, there's nothing wrong with it. But when you compare it to other Arc based distros it feels a little bare. And I'm only judging it because I'm comparing it against those other Arc based distros. It just doesn't feel like there's an identity and maybe their identity is to be as close to Arc Linux as possible. Maybe that is their identity and there's nothing wrong with that. And it's not necessarily anything that really stands out because there's four dozen different ways of installing vanilla Arc Linux that isn't the Arc Linux ISO. And every single one of them is going to get you to this point where you have a stock version of whatever you installed and that's it. There's no personality behind it because you're meant to install the personality yourself. And maybe that's what you're meant to do here. And obviously what I went through and did, I installed I3 I think that made it my own. And that's what you do with Arc Linux. So that's what you probably should do with EndeavorOS. But out of the box, it doesn't feel like there is a identity that makes EndeavorOS special. And that's one of the things that I don't really get, right? It feels like a very nice distribution that doesn't have a soul if that makes sense. It's just, it doesn't feel like they've put a lot of effort into the post installation experience that you're going to have. They have a welcome app and after that that's gone, you're on your own. You're just basically using Arc Linux. And that's fine if that's what you want, but it doesn't really set them apart from any of the other ways of installing Arc Linux, if that makes sense. I'm not really explaining it well. I'm also not saying that it's a bad thing. Like it's not, being very close to Arc Linux and being an easy way to install Arc Linux is a reasonable goal to be. Like it's a reasonable thing to be. It's just not special. It's not anymore. Maybe when they first started, it was special, but now there's, like I said, there's two dozen ways of installing Arc Linux through a GUI installer and they're all varying levels of, okay, I mean, they're just what they are. So those are really my thoughts on EndeavorOS. The question I always ask at the end of these long-term reviews is, am I going to stay on EndeavorOS? And the answer to that question is no. Not necessarily because there's anything bad about it. There's not anything bad about it. I do want to use something different so I can install something other than the audacity that I'm using. And as of right now, the audacity that I'm using is the only thing that's available to me on EndeavorOS. I can't get anything else to build. So that's one of the reasons why I'm going to be switching away from it. But I don't think that's a purely Endeavor problem or even if it is, I guess it doesn't really matter. But the point is that's going to be the reason why I left behind. I'm not leaving it behind because it's necessarily a bad distribution. So the answer to the question is no. I won't be sticking on EndeavorOS basically for the audacity of reason. But I could see myself installing it in the future just because I would want something that is very close to Arch Linux that's easy to install and doesn't have a lot of fluff on top of it. That's a good reason to install it, I suppose. And it's something that might appeal to me in the future. So EndeavorOS is a good enough distribution if that's what you're looking for. So that is it for this video. If you have comments on EndeavorOS, I'm sure that I'm going to hear from many of their very passionate fans in the comments section below. So if you have those kind of comments, leave those in the comments section below. I'm very interested to hear from you on your experiences with EndeavorOS. I know there's a lot of people out there that really enjoy this distribution and I'm happy for you guys. And I would like to hear from you. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. If you'd like to shout at me over there, you can do so. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. You can follow me on any number of social media sites. I'm on Mastodon. I'm on Discord. I have a Telegram group. All those links will be in the video description. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Today, Devon, Patrick, I'm Maglen, Jackson, F&T, Steve, A, Seberg, Linux, Pierre, Mitchell, ArtCenter, Carbonated, Jamie, Sean, Odin, Marni, AndyP, Merrick, Kamp, Joshua, Lee, J-Dog, Peter, A, Crucible, DarkVenus, X-Bladion, Primus. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.