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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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EndeavourOS is easy to install but unclear how to maintain.
pacman, pacdiff, yay, eos, AUR??? The Complete Idiots Guide did not clear things up for me, either. AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.Don’t use GUI package managers, but here, have some GUI package managers.
What GUI package managers are you referring to? EOS doesn't supply any.
AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.
If I'm not mistaken, this is all stuff you should also be doing on Arch. The single difference is that EOS provides a button in their "Welcome" app that will helpfully run a command for you in a terminal for some of these tasks.
The welcome app shows several package management buttons, but no clear explanation of what they really do or if & how they relate to each other. What’s a beginner to do, click each one multiple times and hope for the best?
By introducing more package management commands than came with Arch, they’ve made it seem more complicated, not less. Am I supposed to use eos-update as well as the other commands, or is it supposed to replace one or more of the other commands? Admittedly I’ve only spent half a day with EndeavourOS—the first Arch-based distro I’ve ever used—but I have no idea.
I don’t think it compares well to a beginner’s experience of package management on Debian or Red Hat or Alpine-based distros.
What’s a beginner to do
Well that's just it; Endeavour is not a beginner distro. It's not designed to be. Endeavour is Arch with a graphical installer and some modest quality of life improvements for users who are otherwise willing to trawl through the Arch wiki for answers. The welcome app really just seems to be there so that you don't have to memorize all the commands or set up aliases, etc, if you don't want to.
So when you ask "am I supposed to X," the answer is that there really isn't a set-in-stone workflow to accomplish anything on EOS or Arch; what you're supposed to do is read the manual, so to speak, and decide for yourself how you want to go about things.
Unlike some other Arch based distros like BlendOS and Manjaro, Endeavour is still very much a DIY distro.
I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went.
I don't get your surprise. With a decent laptop like the one you have everything will work properly. You can even load something more stable like Debian into that and it will work just fine on the first attempt. No changes required.
The issue with stuff "not working out of the box" is usually related to people using unbranded potatoes or very old hardware with modern distros.
I'm glad it's going easy for you. Unfortunately after 3 hours of trying I still haven't gotten mint cinnamon installed yet. Bitlocker has been a pain to disable. I'm determined to get it working though, I'm really tired of microsoft
Maybe I upped the game too much when I decided to run Kinoite on Pi...
Yep, at this point Linux just does what I need it to.
As long as your pc is a little bit behind its gonna be ok (unless you have a certain wifi chip)
Linux works for roughly 80% of what I do. The BIG missing piece is audio production. The software is mostly okay, it's the actual audio system that's the problem. Audio on Linux sucks big floppy donkey dicks. Yes, I know all about JACK (complicated and never works the way you think it should), RT kernels, Pipewire, etc. It's all terrible.