The Atlantis release is in orbit
Published on December 3, 2021 by Bryan Poerwoatmodjo
Yes, as you might have noticed in the title, we have started to name our releases and we are more than proud to present you our latest one, Atlantis.
The reason why we started naming the releases has to do with us changing our work method. Our team has grown since the last release and in order to give each team member time to do their task, we now freeze the ISO development at a certain point and to try to avoid confusion by calling it the December release, while the ISO has a November date in its name. Also, it emphasizes the fun factor in this project. Like you, we are just having fun creating and sharing our work with you.
To stay in the space theme, we named this release by Endeavour’s older sister Shuttle Atlantis and our future releases will carry other spacecraft’s names… And no, there’s not going to be an Endeavour release, nor one with the troubled Space Shuttle names like Columbia or Challenger in case you’re wondering…
EndeavourOS united
Before I go into the specifics of the new release, I’m starting with a small addition made on the website and a sneak peek into our future plans. With this, I’m also hoping to address some burning questions and requests we have received from you.
When the project started in 2019, we were already surrounded by an international helpful community. Through these years, some community-driven Telegram groups were also created to overcome some language barriers in seeking help. After all, when trying to seek answers, it is easier to express it in one’s native language.
Those groups are an essential key in representing the project’s friendly community vibe, so it is high time to acknowledge these Telegram groups on our website.
The represented Telegram language groups For EndeavourOS are Spanish, Dutch, Turkish and of course, our official English group. You can find the link under Community in the top menu bar to join them.
Discourse, the swiss army knife forum
Having said that, I also take the opportunity to highlight that our forum also has representation in the following languages, Arabic, Catalan, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Greek, Italian, Philipino, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Sinhala, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
The forum software Discourse is open source and works perfectly well on all devices, including tablets and phones. So if you don’t feel comfortable creating an account with your phone number, you can use your forum account by opening it in your browser and adding the address as a shortcut to the start screen of your mobile device. After you’ve done that you will see our logo on the screen, the shortcut also notifies you, according to your preferences, as if it is a native app running on your mobile device.
A sneak peek into the future
In the wake of the represented languages mentioned above, I’m going to start a project of making the main website multi-lingual in the upcoming weeks, working on each language in stages. Which language will appear first is depending on the available time of our volunteering translators. The goal is to have the entire project done by the end of 2022. If you want to help us with this, just contact me (Bryanpwo) on the forum, on Telegram or you can also use the contact form on the website.
Similar to the August release, Atlantis is merely focused on technical improvements, as you can read further on but we have received requests if we could add some more DE and WM options in Calamares.
At this moment there are some community editions in preparation like Qtile, Openbox and a brand-new WM called Worm created by Codic12, one of our community editions developers. We will release them as soon as they are ready.
As for DEs, we are looking into adding UKUI, LXDE and perhaps the return of Deepin in the near future.
We are also talking with an active French Linux Gaming community developer to create a ready to go edition for Gamers.
Last but not least, we haven’t forgotten EndeavourOS ARM. A year ago, we promised an improved installation experience and now the dust is settling around the ISO-NEXT project, we are going to work on that promise.
The Atlantis release
It has been three months since we introduced our renewed ISO-NEXT release and the response we received for it was a true treasure-trove of useful feedback, so to everyone who has submitted their findings, thank you so much! Your input helped us to push EndeavourOS to the next level.
As said before Atlantis ships a lot of technical improvements, to be clear the improvements we’re talking about involves mostly the installation of a new system.
When you already are running EndeavourOS, you have received the latest updates already and in the case of the newly added community wallpapers, you just have to click the button on our Welcome app Download more EndeavourOS wallpapers to retrieve them.
EOS apps improvements and additions
- NVIDIA users have a new sanity check for NVIDIA and kernel updates. The check helps preventing boot problems after update. Apps UpdateInTerminal, eos-update-notifier and welcome include this update check.
- Welcome has a new button DE: information (DE is the installed desktop name) and opens the browser to the dedicated DE info page.
- Our eos-apps-infois added by default.
- The eos-apps-info-helper is now capable of showing information about many more apps, and it supports using a web browser which can be configured by yourself.
- An addition to paccache-service-manager has been made, which now ships with a checkbox for deleting the cache of uninstalled packages.
- A new and improved schedule configuration window for eos-update-notifier.
- The function grub-toolsnow adds info and warnings when needed about variable GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER in /etc/default/grub.
- An improvement on AKMthat marks the current running kernel with the * symbol.
Calamares
- The option to send logs when an installation failed is now working again.
- Calamares can read the output from pacman actions now and will show the install of the packages under the progress bar. With this addition we no longer need the second debug terminal to show log outputs from pacman for pacstrap and cleaner scripts.
- We now make use of randomized EFI path naming, to avoid overwriting the efi entry when installing a second EndeavourOS system alongside using the same ESP.
- Installing XFCE and i3 at the same time is possible again – using the old method to install i3 setup/theme (fetching it from GitHub/GitLab) for now, instead of the skel package for i3 to be able to have i3 themed as used in XFCE.
- fstrim.timer is now enabled by default.
- Nvidia proprietary driver – DRM modesetting is enabled by default, to solve the issue of booting into a black screen for Optimus systems.
- Nvidia driver still gets installed by default if user boots from Nvidia Boot Option, now nvidia-drm.modeset=1 will be added to the grub kernel line to prevent booting the system with Nouveau.
- BTRFS now uses zstd for installation on both SSD and HDD.
- A package list clean up on i3-wm and all the DE selections to install only the most necessary settings.
- The EndeavourOS repo packages and the welcome app now connects to GitLab by default, to avoid issues for users in countries that have blocked GitHub. Although the option to connect to GitHub is still there for those who wishes to.
- For the same reason we have removed GitHub from our mirrorlist.
- The method to install one of the community editions has been changed. Now you choose the community edition first, which is a fixed settings package that can’t be altered to avoid failed installs, then you get to the base package module where you can deselect certain packages if you wish to. If not, you can leave it as it is, which is highly recommended for new and inexperienced users. To make it a bit more clear here’s a video:
ISO and running systems
- OS prober is installed by default again for a better experience managing multi-booting several systems.
- Improvement for legacy boot, the label now fits the requirements for FAT formatting.
- We now offer the possibility to write your own bash commands to file user_commands.bash. This feature is an advanced extension to the existing feature in file user_pkglist.txt.
- Legacy/Bios boot now has a fixed label name to make it compatible for older Bios systems.
- The r8168 driver is not installed on the ISO anymore, the r8169 module from the kernel is used by default when the ISO boots. However, auto detection makes it possible to install and switch to the r8168 module if needed with a a popup message that appears in those cases. When chosen, the system will install the driver locally from the ISO (no internet connection needed) and enable the r8168 module, which also will be used on the installed system.
- VMD fixes have been made to prevent the issue of Intel RST technology drives not being recognised by the system.
- To get certain PCIe-based M.2 drives recognised by the system, nvme_load=YES added to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub by default.
- SWAY WM is now using ly DM as a workaround due to lightdm issues in combination with the WM.
- Pipewire is now enabled by default.
- Some new community wallpapers have been added, including the images used in this announcement.
- A hotfix feature is added to the ISO, so the developers can immediately push an immediate bugfix to the ISO without creating a new one. The hotfix feature will start automatically in the Welcome app, checking and downloading fixes before Calamares has started. This feature is available from this release and onwards, so the previous releases don’t have this feature baked-in. This does not mean the ISO is on a rolling release also, the offline installer periodically still needs a new ISO release. The hotfix feature only gives us the opportunity to anticipate faster when a bug does appear, it also helps to reduce the workload for the dev team.
Just have fun with it!
To all the aspiring EndeavourOS astronauts and sailors who want to try Atlantis, I have two important things to say.
First one, even though we carefully tested this release, keep in mind that we don’t have access to every single working hardware in the world, this project is a labour of love after all. If you stumble across an issue, just notify us and together we can improve the install experience.
And last but not least, you’re not alone during your journey, our fantastic community is there to help you ship-shaping your Endeavour, just have fun with it!
I hope we have given you the inspiration to give our Atlantis release a try because it was a pure pleasure for us to create it for you.
Love,
The entire EndeavourOS dev team, moderators, translators and community members.
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