I haven’t blogged about the EndeavourOS installation for a while.

Let’s have a look at the new EndeavourOS Gemini. I’m going to install it into a KVM virtual machine.

The installer now features KDE Plasma instead of Xfce as in the past (and the Arm installer has been removed, unfortunately):

As usual, I update the mirrors through the Welcome app; note that you also have the partition manager if you want to partition in advance. I’ll use the partition program during the installation.

Let’s start the installer; I choose “Online” because I want to install GNOME:

The installer is still the good Calamares:

In that respect, nothing has changed since the last time I used that. It has been a bit polished and uses the KDE dark theme. The following steps are as usual:

As I said, I’ll go for GNOME:

Then, you can refine the package selection; note that for GNOME, there are a few small customizations implemented by EndeavourOS, but if you scroll down, you can also go for a Vanilla GNOME:

By default, the most interesting applications are already selected:

As for the boot loader, the default is systemd-boot, but I prefer the good ol’ grub:

Since I’m testing this in a virtual machine, I’ll have the partitioner erase the whole disk, but you can always opt for manual partitioning:

Time to insert the user information, a quick recap, and then the installation starts with the usual slide show:

And we’re done: ready to reboot into the installed system:

Here’s the installed system:

Remember that GNOME defaults to Wayland (it’s been like that for a few years now):

Now that we’re in the installed system, thanks to the automatically installed spice agent, I can scale the virtual machine:

(I had to install Neofetch; I remember that it was automatically installed in the past.) We have GNOME 46.1 (at the time of writing):

“Gnome Tweaks” has already been installed, so a few aspects of GNOME can be easily customized.

Firefox is there, but as in the past, you must install Thunderbird (same for LibreOffice).

Concerning the theme, EndeavourOS uses “Qogir” for the cursor and icons, which look very nice.

Note that the tracker3-miners package is not installed by default, so “Search Locations” is disabled:

I use Tracker often, and it might be a bit confusing not to install this component by default. On the other hand, if not configured correctly, Tracker becomes a resource hog, so EndeavourOS’ choice might be a good one.

As usual, EndeavourOS proved to be an awesome Arch Linux experience! Very well done!

Now it’s time to run my Ansible playbook to install and configure Gnome 🙂