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EndeavourOS Gemini drops ARM: Ships with Proprietary NVIDIA Drivers

EndeavourOS Gemini release ditches open-source NVIDIA drivers for the proprietary ones.

Being one of the top Arch-based user-friendly Linux distributions around, EndeavourOS is a lightweight offering that focuses on giving users a no-nonsense experience, with minimal amount of preinstalled apps.

In a recent announcement, the developers have just released a new release in the form of EndeavourOS Gemini, which takes its codename from NASA's Gemini program.

During the launch, the devs added that:

The road to Gemini, named after the NASA program that was a bridge between the Mercury and the Apollo missions, was a real journey for our developing team but they got the release in top shape with an endless perseverence in a relatively short time.

So, let's get started with this release!

🆕 EndeavourOS Gemini: What's New?

a screenshot of endeavouros gemini desktop with gparted and about this system page open

Like many recent distro releases, this release benefits from the stability of Linux kernel 6.8, and comes equipped with Calamares 3.3.5 and Mesa 24.0. Sadly, owing to maintenance issues, the ARM installation option has been removed from EndeavourOS.

On the desktop environment side of things, EndeavourOS now features KDE Plasma 6, which makes use of the X11 session for the live environment but defaults to Wayland after installation is complete.

However, users can switch to the X11 session if they don't prefer Wayland by using the SDDM login manager.

GParted has made a comeback after many users reported that the KDE partition manager lacks a few features that GParted has. The devs have also addressed an issue with the EFI partition not being created correctly when the “replace partition” option was chosen.

Interestingly, this release uses the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver instead of the NVIDIA-dkms driver, as the latter was causing freezing issues in the Live environment.

You can dive deeper into this release by referring to the official announcement blog.

📥 Get EndeavourOS Gemini

For new installations, you can head to the official website to download the latest EndeavourOS release. For existing users, there's no need to do anything if you keep your systems updated.

💬 Already running this release? Going to get it? Let me know below!

Suggested Read 📖

Top 10 User-friendly Arch-Based Linux Distributions [2024]
Want to experience Arch Linux without the hassle of the complicated installation and setup? Here are a few user-friendly Arch-based Linux distributions.

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