EndevourOS - First thoughts

I have an old work laptop floating around - a Toshiba Z40-A. I've actually been using it for a decade in some capacity. It was my second allocated work machine, and it's followed me through a few position changes. Eventually it was my "service laptop" - the laptop I'd drag around into data centres - have hanging off the edge of racks and what not to do work - while my "current" device would stay safe on my desk and not be at risk of rapid catastrophic disassembly. 

I finally got told recently that it needed to get off our network given it was so old. I was given a much more modern "old" laptop, and I nuked it. 

Last year, I purchased a secondhand Microsoft Surface Pro 4 - as much as I dislike Microsoft (and the Surface products), the form factor suited my needs at the time - I wanted something to take away to Bathurst that would allow me to VPN quickly to work if necessary.  Anyway, that device is now dead and gone. 

To replace it, I decided that I'd resurrect said Toshiba Z40-A. It's still a pretty good laptop. Core i5 CPU, 12GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. It didn't come with that much RAM or SSD.. I may have given it a few upgrades from spare parts while it was still my primary machine when I was a technician. 

A quick fresh install of Windows 10, fix a couple of drivers and install the work VPN. That's enough for work. Literally. I then shrunk the partition and got around to installing Linux for the personal stuff. 

I'd been tossing up moving away from Ubuntu MATE. I've been using Ubuntu for years. It's simple and it mostly just works. The problem is that at a time when most people are becoming outraged at Red Hat, I'm outraged at Canonical (who do Ubuntu).  They've been pushing "Ubuntu Pro" recently. It's not without its value - but at the same time, they're also knackering some of the past capabiltiies - right now such as being able to do an upgrade over 18.04LTS. Don't have Pro? You're not doing it. Would have been great to have been told that by them before it happened. Not after the fact as they're standing there with their hand out wanting us to give them more cash. Pass.

I looked around for more interesting Linux distributions recently - thinking about what my main desktop should run and I come across EndevourOS. It's built on Arch Linux - something I've used briefly before. I'm not terribly keen on using Arch directly - it's reputation is that of being something that requires a fair amount of effort to setup. I'm a Linux sysadmin. I'm also married and have kids. "A fair amount of effort" isn't something I get the luxury of when it comes to setting up my own computers. 

EndevourOS looked interesting enough. Choices of desktop manager to be selected during install sounded the most interesting. 

I grabbed the ISO and created a USB installer and set it up on the Toshiba to see how I went with it. 

The install was fast enough - I chose the MATE desktop manager -simply because it's what I normally prefer, it works well on older hardware.. and I don't have to think too hard about it. 

Once it was installed, everything just appeared to work. 

Where it gets interesting is the package manager. It has a few options but generally it relies heavily upon its own repositories that appear to be full of apps repackaged to work on it. I'm a little uneasy about this given that means that third parties are doing things to apps rather than the vendors directly. 

At the same time - in reality, I'm not an app heavy user. A web browser, mail client, terminal and an RDP/VNC client, and that's about all I need. 

It's hard to give it a thorough run down as yet, as I really haven't done much with it. The install was certainly easy enough for me - but then I put some effort into reading about the installation process and I'm familiar enough with the various GUIs to know which one I wanted to use. 

The performance is great on my decade old laptop - but then it's always been a good laptop. 

It's a fairly easy way to get into Arch without as much time commitment. This might be useful to anyone who is into Linux but not terribly skilled but wants some exposure to Arch based distributions. Or to those who want to try it but simply have better things to do. 

I'm not entirely sure about their package management as yet. I mean, it's potentially no worse than the myriad of repositories plenty of niche Ubuntu apps require you to use as well, but there are plenty of apps that don't require third party repositories that just work on both. But Ubuntu's seems to be bigger. It's a trust issue on my part - and trust isn't my strong suit. 

Linux newbies: Not the OS for you. There are plenty of better alternatives. PopOS!, Ubuntu and so on. Plenty of choices out there that have some familiarites to either Windows or Mac users that might help ease the transition. Ubuntu isn't hard but is super well supported - and that has a lot going for it.

Linux enthusiasts: Possibly the OS for you. Possibly not a recommended daily driver depending on your needs. Throw it in a VM and experiment and make sure that you can get what you want out of it before committing to it. It's easy enough to work with, but dive into the package manager. Plenty of options for GUIs. Heaps of stuff to fiddle around with. Have fun with it while you can.

Linux pros: Easy way into Arch without the time commitment. Just pick your preferred desktop manager during install  Throw it on a spare machine or into a VM and poke it to make sure it suits your needs. There's always a question mark around Arch stability when updates get pushed, so you may want to exercise some caution using it as your daily driver if you're going to put a lot of effort into building up your desktop environment. 

Personally - I'm a fan of my desktop environment being very simple to make recovery fast should I need to rebuild, move machines, whatever. I'm also not constrained to a single machine, so I can keep working should this become a problem. YMMV. 

At this stage, when my new (old) PC arrives, I'm probably going to give EndevourOS a go on it too. It seems to do what I need. The desktop manager choice during install is huge plus for me to be honest. I find desktop managers make or break distributions for me.  Sure, I know that they're things that can be changed after installation - but quite simply - that stuff takes time and nearly always comes with the compromise of not looking like it grew there and lacks the distributions customisations. 

I simply don't want to spent a lot of time moving into an installation. I want to copy my user profile in, install one or two apps, and have a working machine. If I wanted to spend a day or two installing stuff and getting it right, I'd just use Windows. Having what I want "out of the box" is a big plus. It's probably why I've been using Ubuntu Mate for the past few years. Mate is the desktop manager I like the most - it's fast, slimline and keeps its components out of my way. 

An enthusiast would probably enjoy a lot of that stuff. Personally, I've been using Linux for 25 odd years and I've been managing hundreds of Linux servers for the past 5. I'm simply at a point where at lot of that stuff is like work, and I'm not that interested in doing that if I'm not getting paid for it - I do have a life beyond work. I love Linux, but I'm not going to put a lot of hours of my own time into it any more. I've done my time already, so I'm gonna keep it simple.