TL;DR After flying high with "Artemis" and the first release of "Cassini", this distro has reached the beginning of the end IMHO. This was a very disappointing development. Even though I understand the "team" was reduced, so the "community" editions had to be abandoned, they could have still gone with XFCE for the Live ISO. Instead they took a decision which will bring more people to the fold which will likely browse that Live ISO and not actually install the operating system. Unlike with "Artemis" which was darned fast booting and shutting down, and I'll bet lighter.
Calamares is good for the users but it looks like it's helium for developers. One example is the decision to install the LTS kernel, which might be contradictory in a rolling-release distro. It will always install the latest kernel for Arch Linux. However, when this (clarifying this is about EndeavourOS) Linux OS is left alone to boot, it always chooses the latest. Therefore the user has to take charge to go into the LTS kernel. If he/she wishes for that LTS kernel to be the only one, he/she must remove the "linux" and "linux-headers" packages, then run "grub-mkconfig" just in case to make sure when the next time the operating system is booted, it finds only the LTS kernel that has remained. I should do this with Manjaro MATE as well.
I have installed EndeavourOS "Galileo" with XFCE which is odd because previously I only had to go offline to do that, but it cannot be done any longer and by this time I hate KDE Plasma starting with v5.24, offered by anybody. Right after log-in and desktop start, firing up XFCE Terminal and running "inxi", it reports it uses over 800MiB. This is almost twice as much as my Debian XFCE "Bullseye" under the same conditions. Wasn't running a web browser nor any other program, and I had Bluetooth, Update Notifier and a few other startup programs/services disabled. The distro installation is OK but does everything noticeably slower than what I had from "Artemis" last year.
But that older installation was before the bloated and buggy XFCE v4.18 was released last December. Largely because of this newer XFCE I dumped Debian "Bookworm" with it and have kept away from the latest MX Linux, settling for "Wildflower" with Fluxbox. I guess the upgrade of the D.E. was one of the reasons why it was ditched from the EndeavourOS Live ISO. Also because people "want" Wayland on their shiny new equipment. Oh well.
I would like to see how Solus proceed offering XFCE instead of MATE. It looks like there is any motivation to force Wayland on neither desktop.
I'm not a hater of XFCE. I have at least five distros based on Debian with this D.E., but I tolerate the "new" one with Spiral Linux by this time, to boot into a different computer than the one I'm using to go into this site, which wants to go into Windows10 all the time and therefore is less progressive about choosing an EFI file. And now I also have this EndeavourOS "Galileo". But I don't know for how much longer.
9to5linux.com
