EndeavourOS founder Bryan Poerwo announced today the release and general availability of EndeavourOS Apollo as the newest ISO snapshot of this Arch Linux-based GNU/Linux distribution for the masses.
Yes, the Apollo has landed, four months after EndeavourOS Atlantis and three and a half months after EndeavourOS Atlantis Neo, full of improvements around the installation process and to the live session in an attempt to attract more users to this popular Arch Linux-based rolling-release distro.
First of all, let’s talk about the big features in EndeavourOS Apollo, which is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.17 kernel series and the Mesa 22 graphics stack series. This is the best combination you can get at the moment if you want state-of-the-art hardware support and gaming performance.
Another new feature in this release is the addition of a new window manager called Worm and developed by a member of the EndeavourOS community. Written in Nim, Worm is a lightweight window manager for X11 that supports floating and tiling modes.
“Codic12 decided to develop this WM to satisfy his need for a lightweight window manager that worked well with both floating and tiling modes and had window decorations with minimize, maximize, and close buttons in any layout desired and that could run on a semi-embedded system like the [Raspberry] Pi Zero,” said Bryan Poerwo. “It does implement most of the important bits of the EWMH and ICCCM specifications, so most applications should run just fine.”
On top of that, new EndeavourOS installations will now get the FirewallD firewall enabled by default, a new graphical utility that lets users select and install the apps they need, as well as a command-line tool that helps NVIDIA GPU users install the latest NVIDIA graphics driver, including the 470 and 390 series legacy drivers.
Talking about new installations, EndeavourOS Apollo brings a much-improved installation experience that lets you install both Xfce and i3 graphical environments, installs EndeavourOS Community Editions with their dedicated login manager, adds a new Info button for customized installations, and compresses files on Btrfs installs.
Of course, Calamares, EndeavourOS’ default graphical installer received various improvements, and there are also some fixes around mirrors so you can install the distribution faster. You can read all about the changes included in EndeavourOS Apollo on the release announcement page.
Last updated 6 mins ago