EndeavourOS

When Antergos announced the end of the project on May 21, 2019, it left an enthusiastic and friendly community behind.

Bryan Poerwoatmodjo, an Antergos moderator, opted the idea to maintain the community on a new forum. The idea got a lot of support within the community and within a day Johannes Kamprad, Fernando Omiechuk Frozi and Manuel joined him to realise the plan.

With Fernando Omiechuk Frozi joining the team, the idea of maintaining the community on another forum, transformed to creating an Arch-based distribution with that dynamic and friendly community in its core, since he already created an Antergos derivative called Portergos with an offline installer offering a single desktop environment based on Xfce.

The original plan was to use the Antergos net-installer Cnchi, that offered nine desktop environments and a base install to choose from, but due to technical difficulties the team decided to launch the distribution with just the offline installer based on Portergos and planned to come up with a net-installer later in development.

Within a week the team presented the plan to the community and began developing the distribution, the website and the forum.

When the team couldn't get the Antergos installer Cnchi working, they had to look for a replacement that offered the same GUI convenience and ended up using Calamares since it also supports a net-installer.

With the sudden end of the Antergos project fresh in their minds, the team came up with a plan to create a distribution that was easy to maintain by keeping the repository small and offer a close to Arch Linux experience with the convenience of a GUI installer. Since RebornOS, another Antergos derivative, already took the road Antergos travelled, the team came up with the idea to create an almost close to Arch system with a friendly and supportive community at its core.

This meant discarding preinstalled apps and packages, like an email client or an office suite from the repository and making the terminal the visible heart of the system again.

This plan received mixed reviews within the community, especially the exclusion of Pamac, a popular GUI wrapper for Pacman the package manager for Arch Linux, in the repo.

The main idea is to give the user freedom to create a system to their specific needs and getting to learn the system by installing the desired packages themselves, with help from the community.

With their new philosophy, the team has made a conscious choice to target a specific audience that either already knew Arch Linux, but wanted a fast and simple install, or the "distro-hoppers" who already had some Linux knowledge but wanted to explore Arch Linux without the technical install procedure of the base distribution.

By not shipping a GUI package manager by default, the team is convinced that the user will be more aware of what they are installing and therefore have more control on the installed system. It doesn't matter if the user decides to go 'pure Arch', use GUI apps like Pamac or Octopi or use sandbox solutions like Snaps or Flatpak, there's no judgement from the developers side. The user decides how the system rolls.

On July 15, 2019, EndeavourOS released their first ISO. The team did not expect that much of the Antergos community would follow them, but the response and the numbers of community members that joined exceeded their expectations. Not only did the community receive the first release very well, but several bloggers and vloggers gave it rave reviews, even shortly after launch.

Immediately after the launch of the distribution, the EndeavourOS team began to develop a net-installer to install with different Desktop Environments directly over the internet.

The release of the net-installer was first expected to happen on the 15th of November 2019[3], but was eventually delayed until December 22nd.[4] It gives users the ability to choose from a variety of desktop environments and driver packages during the installation process. The ISO is including offline install with default Xfce4 Desktop themed with EndeavourOS branding and option to choose Net-install on startup of the installer Calamares.[5]

On September 11, 2019 EndeavourOS announced that they will release an online magazine to give their users some background information on Arch commands and to inform them on new packages to explore. The magazine named Discovery, like the name of the distribution inspired by the names of James Cook's vessels and the Space crafts of the Space Shuttle program, will be launched in November 2019.