EndeavourOS is a user-friendly Arch Linux-based rolling release distro with some excellent GUI tools and a GUI installer that simplifies handling an Arch Linux system. In other words, it might be the perfect solution for less experienced Linux users to get the best Arch Linux offers.
Just in time for the Christmas holidays, with their last flight of the year, the “Linux astronauts” at EndeavourOS chose to bring their users the brand new Cassini release. So without further ado, let’s see what it has for us.
What’s New in EndeavourOS Cassini
Three months after the launch of the Nova release of the EndeavourOS Artemis series, Cassini is coming to please fans of this user-friendly Arch-based distribution with few but quality improvements.
Although the developers have modestly left it out of the announcement, probably taking it as a routine part of any rolling-release distribution’s approach to software, we have big news here.
And is that just four days after the official release of the brand new Xfce 4.18 desktop environment, it is now available in this EndeavourOS Cassini release. This makes the distro the first to give an installation ISO image with the hottest latest Xfce version yet.
The other significant under-the-hood change is the switch from Bashโs mkinitcpio script to Dracut, a toolset that provides enhanced functionality for automating the Linux boot process.
The Calamares installer has received a cleanup of its codebase, but more importantly, you now have the choice of installing the GRUB 2 bootloader or utilizing the default systemd-boot. Furthermore, you can even choose not to install any bootloader at all.
Of course, this option is mainly aimed at experienced users using multi-boot with the necessary skills to configure the bootloader to load EndeavourOS Cassini after installation.
The Cinnamon desktop environment has received a fresh visual makeover by replacing the default Adwaita icon theme with Qogir. The same is true for the Budgie desktop; however, in addition, the Nautilus file manager has been replaced with Nemo.
On the GNOME side, it is noteworthy that in this EndeavourOS release, the now legacy Gedit and Gnome Terminal apps have been replaced with their new equivalents from GNOME 42 onwards, Console and Gnome Text Editor. Here I can argue a lot about how much better the new ones are than the old ones, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
And at the end, we will mention that the EndeavourOS Cassini ISO installation image comes with the following:
- Calamares 3.3.0-alpha3
- Firefox 108.0.1
- Linux kernel 6.0.12
- Mesa 22.3.1
- Xorg-Server 21.1.5
- nvidia-dkms 525.60.11
You can refer to the official announcement for detailed information about all changes. In addition, you can get your copy from the projectโs download page if you want a fresh EndeavourOS Artemis Nova to install.
Of course, you donโt need to perform a fresh install to upgrade to EndeavourOS Cassini if you are already using EndeavourOS. As the distro follows the rolling release model, all you have to do to get the latest is to use the Pacman package manager and type the following into the terminal:
sudo pacman -SyuHowever, if installing from scratch, keep in mind that offline installation doesnโt require an internet connection and provides a fully themed Xfce desktop environment.
