Arch on Easy Mode

Oct 7 2023

I’ve spent the last week using EndeavourOS, and it’s been a delight.

Coming from a history of distro-hopping that includes:

Fedora for the past year.
Linux Mint the year before that.
Pop!_OS for another month or so.
Ubuntu on my servers for as long as I can remember.

I’ve never used such a user-friendly distro. I wouldn’t recommend EndeavourOS to complete beginners, but it is excellent if you already know the Linux basics.

EndeavourOS is essentially Arch but with a good installer.

Installing software is as easy as hitting Super + Enter (yes, I’m an i3 user) and typing

yay fuzzy-name-of-app

Pick the number that best matches the package or script you want, and it installs. I now understand the praise for the AUR. So far, everything I’ve wanted has been in the official or extra repositories, the AUR, or Flathub as a Flatpak.

Coming from Fedora, I was used to dnf being slow (which dnf5 is addressing), so pacman feels much faster.

EndeavourOS has worked with little setup. I haven’t hit any major glitches or strange issues that sent me searching through old forum threads.

Everything has just worked.

Also, I do want to install something like Artix manually some day, and I think getting used to EndeavourOS is a good starting point for that.