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 I am not a huge fan of how certain packages on apt are a few years old and outdated.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?
What made you decide to switch to vanilla arch?
Two reasons actually:
After getting really familiar with EndeavourOS, I was just curious about how hard an actual Arch install was. Then I found out about the official
archinstall
tool bundled in the ISO, decided to try it out, and it gave me a relatively barebones KDE desktop that was super snappy and that I could expand however I wanted. It just felt nice so I decided to stick with it. Now I am so used to usingarchinstall
on my many Arch deployments (desktop, DIY NAS, home theater PC, work laptop, Surface Pro 7) that it really just feels like home.After Antergos shut down, I briefly used Anarchy installer. When that also shutdown, I became a bit wary about the longevity of these smaller community-driven Arch-derivatives. I don’t have anything against them and it’s super cool that these projects exist to expand the appeal of Arch to more users, but personally I wanted to be familiar with something that I knew would exist for a really long time and wouldn’t close down due to the developers getting too tired of doing maintenance, which is a very real thing in FOSS. I am constantly getting new devices and installing Arch on them, so finding a more permanent solution that I knew was always going to be there was important to me.
Good reasons! Thanks!