Eight months after the previous Mercury Neo release, the Arch-based EndeavourOS rolls out its long-awaited Ganymede ISO refresh, introducing the first major update to the live environment and offline installer in quite some time. The developers say the long gap between releases isn’t a sign of trouble, and that the project is doing just fine.
“We still love what we do over here, but we all have chosen to let our lives and loved ones come first over the project. That certainly doesn’t mean we will let you down by letting the community hang there and our releases left to deteriorate. No, we are still active within the community, and our released ISO does receive the necessary updates regularly for the online installer to run smoothly over time.”
The new Ganymede release now brings the ISO back in sync with the current Arch base and includes KDE Plasma 6.5.3, Calamares 25.11, Firefox 145, Linux kernel 6.17, Mesa 25.2, xorg-server 21.1.20, and NVIDIA-utils 580.105.
One of the most significant changes is a complete overhaul of NVIDIA support. The ISO now automatically detects whether a GPU requires the proprietary nvidia driver or the open nvidia-open variant and loads the correct modules in both the live session and the installed system.
Broadcom support has also been adjusted. The broadcom-wl module is no longer enabled by default because it can interfere with other network devices. Instead, the live session prompts the user when a compatible device is detected, and Calamares will install the driver only if it was enabled during the session.
On top of that, the release updates icon naming for eos-qogir-icons to avoid breaking theming on GTK desktops.
Regarding desktop-specific changes, Plasma replaces Maliit with the Qt6 virtual keyboard for SDDM, adds python-jinja for Glances, and switches to libappindicator.
Additionally, GNOME-screenshot is removed from the default package list. LXDE cleans up GTK3 postfixes, replaces Obconf with lxappearance-obconf-gtk3, and renames pcmanfm-gtk3 to pcmanfm. Plus, the i3-WM edition now uses brightnessctl instead of xbacklight.
However, one open issue remains: Windows 11 may fail to boot when installed on a separate drive using systemd-boot, an upstream change EndeavourOS cannot yet resolve. Systems dual-booting from the same drive work normally, and GRUB remains unaffected.
For more information, see the release announcement. For those who opt for a fresh install, the new ISO is now available on the EndeavourOS website. For the rest, running pacman -Syu is enough to upgrade to the latest version.
