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General tips for the EndeavourOS users

Last updated: 2023-Feb-02

For more tips and information, see: https://forum.endeavouros.com

Tip: useful EndeavourOS community links:

Useful considerations

The Welcome app

The welcome app provides info links and many useful system maintenance features (for example: updating system and mirrors, or managing the package cache).
Tip: to run command welcome from the terminal, create a function into your ~/.bashrc:

# add the following line into ~/.bashrc
welcome() { eos-welcome --once "$@" & }

Update problems

Updates may fail for a number of reasons.

Mirrors

Often sub-optimal mirrors cause problems. There are actually two different lists of mirror in use:

  • Arch (file /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist)
  • EndeavourOS (file /etc/pacman.d/endeavouros-mirrorlist)

and most mirror problems are related to the Arch mirrors because a vast majority of packages come from them directly.

The Arch mirror list can be managed with several programs:

  • reflector (a command line interface)
  • reflector-simple (a graphical interface)
  • rate-mirrors (a command line interface)
  • the welcome app (uses reflector-mirror)

and all of them have their pros and cons.

The native EndeavourOS mirrors can be managed with these (CLI) programs:

  • eos-rankmirrors
  • rate-mirrors

Keyrings

Both Arch and EndeavourOS repositores have their own keyrings. If any key in a keyring is not up to date, update problems may occur.

Sometimes command line:

sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring && sudo pacman -Su

will fix the problem.

Nowadays Arch provides an automatic service to update the keyring. The status of the service can be seen with command

systemctl status archlinux-keyring-wkd-sync.timer

Kernels

It is recommended to install two kernel packages:

  • linux (=the default kernel) or another new kernel
  • linux-lts for long time support

This provides a fallback (linux-lts) in rare cases of problematic kernel (linux) update.
Additionally, install their headers as well, e.g. linux-headers and linux-lts-headers. This is a requirement if you install packages that require to be built on your system (typically such package names have suffix -dkms, e.g. nvidia-dkms).

Package xf86-video-intel

Package xf86-video-intel may be required by very old Intel GPUs. Newer Intel GPUs can use the module included in the kernel. The latest (ARC) GPUs may fail to work if xf86-video-intel is installed.

Drivers for the Nvidia GPUs

The latest available Nvidia driver package from the Arch repositories (nvidia-dkms) is recommended for the newer Nvidia GPUs. Program nvidia-inst may help installing the driver packages.

Tips about what not to do with your installed system

Do not favor a GUI package manager over pacman or yay

A GUI package manager may be nice to use for a user unfamiliar with tools like pacman or yay.
However, it is best to use pacman (or yay) to

  • install
  • update
  • uninstall

packages because

  • they have been proved to be more reliable than GUI package managers
  • they can provide additional and essential details about the install or update process, which GUI managers do not provide

Thus learning to use pacman is important and strongly recommended in EndeavourOS.

If you are familiar with a command line package manager from another distro, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta to get an idea how it compares to pacman.

Do not uninstall "unnecessary" packages without thorough investigation

Trying to uninstall packages that seem unnecessary may lead to various problems, e.g. unable to boot the system, or some programs behaving incorrectly.

In other words, do not uninstall any package unless you have thoroughly investigated that the package is not needed by any other program in your system. Note that many packages have dependencies which may complicate the investigation.

Useful investigation tools are e.g.

  • pactree (package pacman-contrib)
  • pacman

As a rule of thumb, don't uninstall a package if you are not sure if it may be needed.

Do not let the package cache fill up the disk

The package cache (a folder where older versions of downloaded package files are stored) will eventually fill up the disk partition unless properly managed. A full (or nearly full) partition will cause lots of problems.

To manage the cache, you can manually remove the oldest package files (or those that are no more installed) with the paccache command.
Or, you can use the paccache-service-manager to manage it automatically.

Do not use AUR packages carelessly

By default, there are basically two kinds of packages:

  • official
  • AUR

(Here we do not consider flatpaks or snaps although they are available as well.)

The official packages are maintained and supported by the Arch and EndeavourOS teams, so they should be considered reliable.

The AUR packages are maintained and supported by the community. This means the Arch and EndeavourOS teams cannot directly control the contents of the AUR packages. Users should check the contents of an AUR package before usage, and may/should report about problems. Then the Arch team can decide what to do with the package.

However, although most AUR packages can be considered reliable, checking the contents for issues is strongly recommended.

An AUR package can be useful if a similar official package is not available. For example, some drivers or special apps are not available in the official repositories.

Do not use grub-customizer

grub is one of the available bootloaders, and grub-customizer is a graphical settings manager for grub. Usage of grub-customizer has caused several serious problems, e.g. made the system unable to boot.
EndeavourOS does not install it by default, and recommends against installing it.