Whilst looking on Distrowatch I came across a review for EndeavourOS, an Arch-based rolling release distribution:
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?i...0511#endeavour

The reader reviews were also extremely positive:
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?re...stro=endeavour

Just for fun I decided to install it on a spare hard drive and see how it performed.

I used Etcher to burn the downloaded ISO to a USB flash drive:
https://www.balena.io/etcher/

I was pleasantly surprised by the Calamares graphical installer which was simple to use and offered a choice of either online or offline installation. The latter option can be very useful to some.

I had previously formatted the drive as GPT and I next used Calamares to create a 512MiB UEFI boot partition (/boot/efi), flagged as boot. I then made 3 further partitions for root, swap and /home.

In Package Selection I chose the Base installation and Printing, together with MATE from the 9 available Desktop Environments.
I also noticed that there was a separate nvidia installer.

The installation proceeded and I then used the Welcome Tool (see attached screenshot) to Update Mirrors, Update System and Add More Apps (I chose LibreOffice and Firewall).

There is also a Log Tool which is useful for sending reports to a forum:

The log file is created in /home/username/eos-log-tool.logs.

The current kernel is 5.7.10 which is useful for those with recent hardware.

More reviews:
https://www.maketecheasier.com/endeavouros-review/

http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/home/e...arch-right-way

https://linuxinsider.com/story/endea...ion-86638.html

In summary, I find EndeavourOS a solid, fast, lightweight distro which is growing on me more and more. I recommend giving it a try.

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Just what the world needs - yet another Arch derivative. I wonder how it'll handle regressions the Arch folks seem to revel in introducing at random intervals.

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Rolling along nicely with EndeavourOS updates at the moment, with Timeshift installed, just in case of regression problems etc.

It is interesting to note that my EndeavourOS installation is much lighter with 898 installed packages, compared to 2081 in my Linux Mint 20 MATE system.

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Another Endeavour user here. I was actually really surprised by Endeavour. I generally dislike Calamares installers, but Endeavour has enough options enabled to actually make it tolerable to me. Used to be a big Anarchy Installer fan, but currently it's simply broken and have been using Endeavour. Love Arch, hate the install, so I tend towards the Arch installers that stay close to a "vanilla" arch experience after install. While Endeavour isn't anywhere as close to that as Anarchy was, it doesn't add a TON of stuff, so I quite enjoy the OS.

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Timothy Miller,

It's good to know that I am not the only one on LQ using EOS.

There appears to be a large number of ex-Manjaro users on the EOS forums.

Not too surprising - I had a devils job getting my head around Manjaro updates. Was around the time of the general Plasma 5 fiasco tho' - still it didn't improve my mood or opinion any.

Yeah, I've never had good luck trying Manjaro. Every time I had tried it, I found it to be far less stable than Arch proper.

I am running Manjaro right now, the only other full featured option for me is Debian (running AARCH64 architecture on PinebookPro). While I have little choice on this hardware, I would like to know when the lack of stability kicked in. So far, it seems stable, fast, and feature complete on my platform. (When will the other shoe drop?)