Eight months after the previous Mercury Neo release, the Arch-based EndeavourOS has released its long-awaited Ganymede ISO refresh, introducing its first major update to the live environment and offline installer in quite some time.
The team notes that development slowed earlier this year due to real-life commitments and upstream issues, but the rolling system itself has continued to receive regular updates. Ganymede now brings the ISO back in sync with the current Arch base and restores a clean installation experience for new users.
The refreshed live environment includes 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. NVIDIA handling is now fully automatic across all stages of installation.
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. The release also updates icon naming for eos-qogir-icons to avoid broken theming on GTK desktops.
On the desktop-specific side, Plasma replaces Maliit with the Qt6 virtual keyboard for SDDM, adds python-jinja for Glances, and switches to libappindicator. 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. 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. The team provides a recommended workaround for affected setups through community documentation.
For more information, see the release’s announcement. The new ISO is now available on the EndeavourOS website.
