I tested it a bit in a VM to get familiar with pacman and yay. Latest KDE Plasma 6 and more snaps in Ubuntu’s future are the main reasons I want to switch.
As I don’t use a separate home partition, I have an extra drive with BackInTime home dir backups and virtnbdbackup snapshots.
Is EndeavourOS stable enough for everyday use and would restoring home with BackInTime just work (as root user)?
If the answer to all that is yes, then skip EndeavourOS and just install Arch directly. If you’re not considering Arch because it’s “too hard” or you don’t have the time/patience, then trying to cheat by installing EndeavourOS will only result in pain down the line. The only thing EndeavourOS is doing is making the instalation process easy - it’s not making Arch itself any more easier to use.
The manual way of installing Arch is a rite-of-passage that tests your patience and comprehension skills. It familiarises you with the Arch wiki, and forces you to learn more about how the OS works behind the scenes. So when things break in the future, or the time comes for you to do a manual intervention - you already have all the skills and knowledge (or know where to look). If you can pass the test of a manual install, then using Arch is easy-peasy. At this point, you wouldn’t care about silly things like stability, because you already know about automated snapshots and restores, bug reports, building/using the latest patch/package from upstream etc… and it’s all second-nature to you. Fixing a broken thing is just another day at the office and your brain won’t even register it as an issue.
So, don’t cheat - if you want to use Arch, just use Arch.
Edit: For those who disagree with me, here’s a recent example of a manual intervention I was referring to: being on EndeavourOS or any other Arch derivatives won’t save you from having to keep up with Arch news and occasionally having to take manual action like this: https://lemmy.nz/post/7648427
Also please do read the full thread - from the discussions there, you’ll see that the steps you’d need to take for that piece of news is not entirely straightforward: some folks might need extra/different steps that’s not explicitly described in the news/wiki. This is the kind of stuff you should be prepared to deal with.
Thanks for the hints, great list! :) I’m a software developer and Ubuntu/Windows sysadmin, so reading wikis, writing shell script and tinkering with the OS is nothing new to me.
On my private Medion laptop, I even got vanilla Arch installed the hard way by following the guide on the wiki (without install script). I took a picture back then while I was creating partitions and the filesystem:
I did this as a challenge for myself and to try hyprland. Didn’t have the time to fully customize the setup, so I chose EndeavouOS as it provides a good base.
The only thing I want to add is that installing arch the right way doesn’t matter if you have installed any linux distro manually. You could install debian the arch way if you wanted to and still come out with the same skill set.