Linux Endeavour OS: switching from Debian 12 Bookworm

fakemishra

fakemishra

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I am given to understand Arch-based systems are ineherently unstable ( last year outage included ) but I want to be on something more than Debian ( which was very good ). Additionally, I want to user BTRFS snapshots in case of trouble- couldn't do so on Debian.

Question is: are there any long terms users of EndeavourOS? I really want to stop distrohopping.
PS- have used almost all distros in the past, and Endeavour is pretty snappy.
 
vishalrao said:
Have you tried OpenSUSE Tumbleweed? Pretty solid and polished. I like it a lot even though I run ubuntu-lts-based distros as daily drivers.

You can download one of the ISOs from https://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/iso/
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Probably back in 2012. Don't remember well enough. Have been hearing good things about Suse of late. But don't know how to manage and whether it is snappy enough. For instance, tried Fedora- and it somehow felt heavy! What has been experience so far?
 
vishalrao said:
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
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Tumbleweed is one great choice, but my time with it hasn't been that great. I normally update during weekends and TW being rolling release that'd be updates piling up to be around1-3gb, this combined with zypper being very slow and no dedicated server were there from India at that time (I think there aren't any even today) and lack of parallel downloads, and you'd be waiting for quite some time for updates to complete.
(Another nitpick was those patterns)

If you want Debian with snapper and grub-btrfs, there's Spiral Linux from the creator of Gecko Linux (Opensuse derivative).

You could also setup fedora with snapper and get a more bleeding edge distro.

Also an interesting project for devs is the ublue-os bluefin/aurora (Fedora atomic distros), great pick for containerized workflow. I've been using it for few months ( works great even with the cursed mixture of Nvidia+Wayland+multi monitors+ secure boot)

These two choice are very different and they give a way to rollback if an update fails (one through snapper and the other uses ostree).
 
I ran the same install of debian testing for over 2 years, and got kinda bored of the stability. I hopped to (vanilla) arch and was very pleased with it until I upgraded to the latest major release of gnome way faster than my extensions updated for it - and gnome is unusable to me without the extensions.

I went to fedora next, and stayed with it. I think it might be what you're looking for.
I currently use a universalblue distro named Bazzite since I have an nvidia card, but I'd highly recommend trying anything based on silverblue. They're really well done imo.
 
I noticed Debian repo CDN (fastly) is, well, quite aptly, very fast... I get full 1gbit (my internet plan) downloads when updating.

For the openSUSE tumbleweed slowness issue, what I did was run a cron rsync script to pre-download everything tumbleweed at regular intervals to my miniPC with a 2TB SATA SSD (the tumbleweed repos take about 100gb space) and I serve it via nginx, plus using Technitium DNS server to point the domain download.opensuse.org to my miniPC local repo mirror LOL so it automatically pulls from the local network.

So I get full 1gbit local LAN speeds whenever I update :cool:

PS: I also do this local mirroring for ubuntu jammy and noble, plus KDE neon repos and some other launchpad PPAs (which are very slow for me) like elementary OS and Firefox PPA.
fakemishra said:
Probably back in 2012. Don't remember well enough. Have been hearing good things about Suse of late. But don't know how to manage and whether it is snappy enough. For instance, tried Fedora- and it somehow felt heavy! What has been experience so far?
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Currently running on a Ryzen 6800U laptop and its quite smooth, gets 8 hours of moderate usage battery life (68 Wh capacity).
 
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vishalrao said:
I noticed Debian repo CDN (fastly) is, well, quite aptly, very fast... I get full 1gbit (my internet plan) downloads when updating.

For the openSUSE tumbleweed slowness issue, what I did was run a cron rsync script to pre-download everything tumbleweed at regular intervals to my miniPC with a 2TB SATA SSD (the tumbleweed repos take about 100gb space) and I serve it via nginx, plus using Technitium DNS server to point the domain download.opensuse.org to my miniPC local repo mirror LOL so it automatically pulls from the local network.

So I get full 1gbit local LAN speeds whenever I update :cool:

PS: I also do this local mirroring for ubuntu jammy and noble, plus KDE neon repos and some other launchpad PPAs (which are very slow for me) like elementary OS and Firefox PPA.


Currently running on a Ryzen 6800U laptop and its quite smooth, gets 8 hours of moderate usage battery life (68 Wh capacity).
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That is impressive. I usually do lot of academic and very little gaming ( Counter strike ) . Nvidia 2050 card. I am actually inclined to give this a go. Really want to stop distrohopping. Will need to see some videos for pointers
 
Trivia: SUSE was first to default to btrfs for their enterprise customers. I have used tumbleweed and it's ok. I used vanilla arch for some time until it hampered my work, went to endeavour and manjaro thinking the upgrades would be spaced out. Used Tumbleweed before that but had the same issue. Eventually Fedora turned out to a good balance. Though I never liked Fedora for unexplained reasons. I use it for my work (laptop) and btrfs is great too I mean it's in-kernel filesystem so nothing special about btrfs in fedora. I run MX Linux on my desktop

In short I use alma/rocky for my servers (Cloud and local) if the image is not available then Debian

Fedora (for laptop) and MX Linux (desktop) for workstations.
 
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rootyme said:
The OOB UI is terrible. How have you customised it? Any SS?
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Nope. I know aesthetics are personal but it's xfce by default (so looks ugly to a lot of people). You can get the KDE one if you want some zing. I hopped through more than 50-60 distros to settle on MX. Life is quieter now. It was between Void and MX and I went with MX.

Edit: My work keeps me in terminal, so all my customisation go there.
 
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mokendkomer said:
I ran the same install of debian testing for over 2 years, and got kinda bored of the stability. I hopped to (vanilla) arch and was very pleased with it until I upgraded to the latest major release of gnome way faster than my extensions updated for it - and gnome is unusable to me without the extensions.

I went to fedora next, and stayed with it. I think it might be what you're looking for.
I currently use a universalblue distro named Bazzite since I have an nvidia card, but I'd highly recommend trying anything based on silverblue. They're really well done imo.
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I switched to Debian- fedora behaves funny with my Nvidia card. But since you mentioned, do Atomic desktops give any distinct advantage over and above Fedora's usual experience? There aren't many videos on youtube about them either. Could you please share you experience?
 
fakemishra said:
I switched to Debian- fedora behaves funny with my Nvidia card. But since you mentioned, do Atomic desktops give any distinct advantage over and above Fedora's usual experience? There aren't many videos on youtube about them either. Could you please share you experience?
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I'm not too experienced with dealing with nvidia drivers either, and vanilla fedora kept having a bunch of quirks with my new pc. I'd have suspend break, or randomly have rendering issues, etc. after updates on fedora even if they worked fine initially after installing the drivers.

I switched to bazzite and I've never been happier. It comes with the nvidia driver preinstalled instead of fedora's implementation, where it comes with noveau and you have to get the good driver through rpmfusion
It has never really broken in any way in my experience, and switching to having all my apps be flatpaks has been mostly seamless. Highly recommended.
 
mokendkomer said:
I'm not too experienced with dealing with nvidia drivers either, and vanilla fedora kept having a bunch of quirks with my new pc. I'd have suspend break, or randomly have rendering issues, etc. after updates on fedora even if they worked fine initially after installing the drivers.

I switched to bazzite and I've never been happier. It comes with the nvidia driver preinstalled instead of fedora's implementation, where it comes with noveau and you have to get the good driver through rpmfusion
It has never really broken in any way in my experience, and switching to having all my apps be flatpaks has been mostly seamless. Highly recommended.
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That is good to hear. I am actually excited about this after reading your feedback. It is just that debian is a little...boring though it works really well I have been looking around for Atomic desktops, but without much idea. Thank you so much for the input. Definitely trying this !!!
Also, is it good for academic work with little CS-Go on the side?
 
fakemishra said:
That is good to hear. I am actually excited about this after reading your feedback. It is just that debian is a little...boring though it works really well I have been looking around for Atomic desktops, but without much idea. Thank you so much for the input. Definitely trying this !!!
Also, is it good for academic work with little CS-Go on the side?
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hell yeah lol glad you're excited

I got bored of debian too, running the same install for years. Bazzite has a few really nice enhancements for your gaming and productivity needs. It comes with an application that gives you a checklist of whatever you want installed, and seamlessly adds those to the system. It also has distrobox for developing things in a sandbox if you care for that. Do share how you like it.
 
You'll never need snapshots with Debian, so I don't see the point.

The best bet would be Linux Mint (if you want Debian base) or else Fedora Linux (although it uses rpm packages and the package management commands are a bit different as they use DNF).

You can use Timeshift with literally any distro but you'll have to set it up manually.

If you want a distro with pre-configured support for snapshots, then openSUSE tumbleweed/slowroll is the best choice. But a warning though, that some updates takes 2+ GB's when they rebuild all the packages when there is a change in the core dependency.

If you're not comfortable with terminal then Arch and based distros are not for you, not even EndeavourOS and even OpenSUSE Tumbleweed breaks.

I usually do lot of academic and very little gaming
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If you want to do work and get things done, then stick with fixed release distros (Mint/Fedora) till you're really comfortable managing a Linux distro (Arch & based) with just the terminal. Even openSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll needs some kind of experience but its worth giving a shot & checking if it fits you.

PS: FYI, CS2 runs like shit even on Windows and running it in Linux, even with Arch Linux and latest packages, runs like an Crysis running on a Pentium 4 system, so forget playing CS2 on Linux.
 
Panda said:
You'll never need snapshots with Debian, so I don't see the point.

The best bet would be Linux Mint (if you want Debian base) or else Fedora Linux (although it uses rpm packages and the package management commands are a bit different as they use DNF).

You can use Timeshift with literally any distro but you'll have to set it up manually.

If you want a distro with pre-configured support for snapshots, then openSUSE tumbleweed/slowroll is the best choice. But a warning though, that some updates takes 2+ GB's when they rebuild all the packages when there is a change in the core dependency.

If you're not comfortable with terminal then Arch and based distros are not for you, not even EndeavourOS and even OpenSUSE Tumbleweed breaks.


If you want to do work and get things done, then stick with fixed release distros (Mint/Fedora) till you're really comfortable managing a Linux distro (Arch & based) with just the terminal. Even openSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll needs some kind of experience but its worth giving a shot & checking if it fits you.

PS: FYI, CS2 runs like shit even on Windows and running it in Linux, even with Arch Linux and latest packages, runs like an Crysis running on a Pentium 4 system, so forget playing CS2 on Linux.
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That is heartbreaking,and true. I only play CS (probably once a month) to relive my IIT days from 20 years back!

I have used Linux for over two decades, and it remains a work in progress.

Thank you for recommendations. To be fair, Arch has not worked well on my system and neither has Fedora. Debian doesn't give problems, but is boring. Which one do you use and how is it?
 
fakemishra said:
That is heartbreaking,and true. I only play CS (probably once a month) to relive my IIT days from 20 years back!

I have used Linux for over two decades, and it remains a work in progress.

Thank you for recommendations. To be fair, Arch has not worked well on my system and neither has Fedora. Debian doesn't give problems, but is boring. Which one do you use and how is it?
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I primarily use Win now since I started playing CS regularly and I dual boot with EndeavourOS (because of AUR) although I would use openSUSE if it had something like AUR (yes, it has something like AUR but its nothing compared to AUR).

I'm very well comfortable with terminal and I know where the configs of something exist and I can read logs easily too and fix stuff, so I'm kinda freak and not the normal PC user.
 
fakemishra said:
That is heartbreaking,and true. I only play CS (probably once a month) to relive my IIT days from 20 years back!

I have used Linux for over two decades, and it remains a work in progress.

Thank you for recommendations. To be fair, Arch has not worked well on my system and neither has Fedora. Debian doesn't give problems, but is boring. Which one do you use and how is it?
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I've also always had problems with Fedora and Nvidia GPU, if you want to stick with Fedora, you can give Nobara a try, it's based on Fedora, just comes with a lot of tweaks, and for me atleast it works pretty flawlessly with my Nvidia GPU.

As for your original post, I have used Endeavour for a pretty long time, I've never faced any issues with it or even arch in general. I think it adds some pretty good qol stuff on top of arch. While people do say "arch is unstable", in my experience it's mostly fine, although being on the bleeding edge version of everything does come with it's discomforts sometimes. My major issue on arch has been mirrors, you might need to update them pretty often in India especially. Although you can just set up a service for it. Being on arch does have its perks too, like the AUR and the extensive community support for any issues if they aren't already mentioned on the arch wiki. You could also give cachy-os a try, although in my experience it wasn't as snappy as endeavour, even if it's more gaming ready out of the box. Feel free to ask any more questions
 
Onuphrius said:
I've also always had problems with Fedora and Nvidia GPU, if you want to stick with Fedora, you can give Nobara a try, it's based on Fedora, just comes with a lot of tweaks, and for me atleast it works pretty flawlessly with my Nvidia GPU.

As for your original post, I have used Endeavour for a pretty long time, I've never faced any issues with it or even arch in general. I think it adds some pretty good qol stuff on top of arch. While people do say "arch is unstable", in my experience it's mostly fine, although being on the bleeding edge version of everything does come with it's discomforts sometimes. My major issue on arch has been mirrors, you might need to update them pretty often in India especially. Although you can just set up a service for it. Being on arch does have its perks too, like the AUR and the extensive community support for any issues if they aren't already mentioned on the arch wiki. You could also give cachy-os a try, although in my experience it wasn't as snappy as endeavour, even if it's more gaming ready out of the box. Feel free to ask any more questions
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+1. I am using Nobara as my daily driver. Nvidia GPU works well.

If you need a Immutable fedora distro you can look at Bazzite distro.
 
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