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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.
This major change won’t affect existing EndeavourOS users as they will be able to continue enjoying the Arch Linux-based distro with their favorite desktop environment. On the other hand, the devs removed the Sway, Qtile, BSPWM, Openbox, and Worm community editions from the Calamares installer as there’s no one left to maintain them.
Moreover, the Calamares installer has been updated in this release to no longer allow you to install more than one of the supported desktop environments in an attempt to prevent problems with various packages conflicting after installation. Also, Calamares’ package selection screen has been restructured to be clearer.
Other new features in the EndeavourOS Galileo release include stronger LUKS2 disk encryption when choosing systemd-boot using argon2id, the EFI partition permissions have been made more strict, fstab has been improved as it’s no longer populated with extraneous defaults in options, and SELinux warnings have been removed during installation to avoid 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 5 months ago
