Salut.

Eish … what do you want me to say? Huh? Endeavour is a brand new ArchLinux derivative, as we see so many of lately. And most are pretty cool, but some are cooler than others, so why bother with the not quite so cool ones?

And here is the thing: Endeavour OS was named as the new, the continuation of the famous, but now dead Antergos project. Eventhough it’s, like, totally different. In concept and execution. Where Antergos tried to spoil us with 20 trillion desktops, attainable from one ISO file (pretty useless feature if you ask me) and with that achieved very looong and laaaaggy installation procedures, Endeavour comes very nice and humble as a one-trick pony with only one desktop environment. They’ve decided on my thirdmost – is that even a word: thirdmost? – favourite desktop, the tried and true Xfce.

So, yes, kinda like Manjaro’s standard flavour … but not like Manjaro at all. Because Manj… hold on a second. This isn’t about the giant Manjaro but about a new little distro standing on  its shoulders. Endeavour OS is closer to Arch upstream and is in so far a closer relative to my fave, Namib GNU/Linux. Only thing both distros have in common is the fabulous Calamares installer. But this writeup ain’t about Namib neither but about Endeavour, ffs!

So let’s see how it went down, ‘kay?

Bad system maintenance by the devs or some stupid mistake by Orca? Who cares? Really, why should I settle for a distribution which only comes with my third choice of desktop. I have it so much better now, and so can you. 😉

What else is there to say: Endeavour is a typical Arch derivative in so far as it comes with only a very small amount of pre-installed software: Firefox. That’s it. Really. No Thunderbird, no Libre Office, no Gimp, nothing cool. Only the system files and tools one needs to operate the sytem. I very much like that approach since I can install everything I need and want by myself and won’t end up with a bloated system.

But it’s indeed the base system I’m not happy with. Xfce isn’t for me entirely, and Endeavour lacks all attributes that would make it outstanding. So after only 1.5 “days” of testing I decide that Endeavour is shit and end the experiment.

Next project: Manjaro. That means Xfce as well. So let’s see where the differences between the two are.