EndeavourOS has a new major release today dubbed Galileo, which comes with some significant and exciting changes for fans of this Arch Linux-based rolling release distribution.
Apart from being powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.6 LTS kernel series, the biggest change in EndeavourOS Galileo is the adoption of KDE Plasma as the default desktop environment instead of Xfce for the live session and the offline installation.
The devs explain the switch from Xfce to KDE Plasma as a way to make EndeavourOS development and maintenance easier for them as they have a more native experience with the Calamares installer.
“When choosing the online install option, Xfce is still there as an option to choose from. For those who like the Xfce theming, we created, this option will still be available after installation through the Welcome app,” says EndeavourOS developer Bryan Poerwo.
Existing users of EndeavourOS will not be impacted significantly by this alteration, as they will still be able to utilise the Arch Linux-based distro with the desktop environment they prefer. However, the Sway, Qtile, BSPWM, Openbox, and Worm community editions were removed from the Calamares installer by the developers due to a lack of ongoing maintenance.
In this release, the Calamares installer has been updated to prevent the installation of more than one of the supported desktop environments, in order to avoid post-installation package conflicts. The structure of the Calamares’ package selection screen was also updated for improved clarity.
Additional upgrades in the EndeavourOS Galileo release include enhanced LUKS2 disk encryption utilizing argon2id when opting for systemd-boot, stricter EFI partition permissions, the elimination of superfluous defaults in options for improved fstab, and the removal of SELinux warning notifications during installation to prevent confusion.
Last but not least, the Welcome app has been updated to support the KDE Plasma desktop environment, Dracut-related packages have been added to Holdpkg to avoid being removed inadvertently, unused LUKS key files are no longer created when systemd-boot is selected, and the correct German keyboard layout is now selected by default for German-speaking users.
EndeavourOS Galileo is available for download right now from the official website. However, this new release is here only for new deployments as EndeavourOS follows a rolling release mode, which means that existing users need only to update their installations on a regular basis using the sudo pacman -Syu command.
Last updated 2 hours ago