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| title | date | tags | draft | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EndeavourOS: a beautiful Arch-Based Distro | 2020-12-03T09:00:36+01:00 |
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A terminal-centric distro with a dynamic and friendly community in its core
The slogan on their homepage perfectly describes the intent of EndeavourOS: create an Arch-based distro that doesn't stray far from the original feel of plain old Arch, but with a friendlier community.
For the uninitiated, it's generally known that the Arch community can be a bit harsh at times; RTFM is a regular occurrence. And even though this encourages people to try things out themselves and learn more about how Linux works, it can be a bit scary for newcomers.
Now, I've been using this distro for about two weeks on my old MacBook, and I have to say that I'm impressed.
Installation
EndeavourOS uses the Calamares installer, so the install is about as straightforward as it gets. I've come to use EndeavourOS as my "easy install" for Arch, because it just feels like regular Arch. You can download their ISO here. They also have an ARM version, which I might try later on my Raspberry Pi.
For my install, I choose the i3wm version, as I prefer tiling window managers. I also discovered that a desktop environment (Plasma in my case) is just too much for my old MacBook to handle, so i3wm was not a difficult choice. The Only thing I changed about the initial config was tweak the key bindings a bit to use the Vim bindings instead of the i3 ones.
First Impressions
When we boot into our fresh installation, we're greeted with a simple, yet elegant LightDM login screen. Out of the box, the i3 config is quite welcoming and polished, albeit a tad crowded for my tastes, but this can be easily solved by editing the config files.
By default, a welcome screen pops up whenever we boot the computer, and a terminal is launched. I personally find this decision quite odd, but to each their own. And of course we can just turn this off by changing one line in the config.
This brings us to how closely this distro resembles pure Arch. No fancy GUIs to configure everything, just a terminal and a text editor is needed to configure it for your own needs.
EndeavourOS is very lightweight, barely consuming 300MB of ram on startup. This result may vary if you've chosen another desktop environment/window manager. This is one of the reasons I chose EndeavourOS: I needed sometimes light, something that my 7-year-old MacBook could run without issues. I previously ran PopOS! on it, and while this is a great distro, it was too heavy for this old thing.