What’s new in EndeavorOS Titan Release?

Earlier this month, the Linux kernel 6.19 was released, and it was a good excuse to refresh our ISO. And as you can read from the title, the changes for this one were big enough to turn it into a big version with a name that really covers this ISO. Named after the second largest moon in our solar system, Titan. So, we’ve borrowed Saturn’s largest moon to orbit our purple Linux space for now. This theme is also reflected in the new wallpaper created by our very creative and trusted community member, Unclespelbinder.

But before I get to the Titan release, I just want to address the recent development regarding age verification for all operating systems in California by 2027.

Age Verification Act

Like many of you, we were surprised by the news last week, and questions quickly followed about our position on this matter. We just have to wait to see how this will develop for FOSS and Linux in general. It is not easy for us to make a clear statement about it at this moment, because this decision involves not only the distros, but also DE/WM environments, software packages and mirror networks. Like Arch, we have no infrastructure to track how many users download or install our system, let alone who is running Endeavor on their machines. In addition to being against FOSS fundamentals, we simply don’t have the manpower or resources to tackle this near-impossible task.

In the creation of this law, not a single person or entity from the FOSS world was represented or heard, and there is still an opportunity to address the concerns for open source software and Linux/Freebsd systems before the law goes into effect. After the news dropped, the OSI, FSF, and Linux Foundation must have realized their mistake in not responding in time and will hopefully spring into action for the many distributions and other FOSS projects, like us, that do not have California or US legal representation. So, all eyes are on them because Colorado and the rest of the world are next… We do not blame any of the organizations mentioned in passing. We are just pointing out that the law is not set in stone yet.

Okay, now that’s out of the way, let’s get into the joyous news of the Titan release.

The Titan release

Wallpaper created by Unclespelbinder

Of course it goes without saying, but I will remind you anyway.

The changes described above only affect new installations, our Calamares installer and the live environment on the ISO. Running systems do not need to “upgrade” to Titan; If you update regularly, your system is fine.

Titan’s live environment and offline installer ships with:

• Squids 26.03.1.3-1
• Firefox 148.0-1
• Linux 6.19.6.arch1-1
• Table 1:26.0.1-1
• Xorg Server 21.1.21-1 (xorg)
• Nvidia-utils 590.48.01-4

For this release, we’ve cleaned up and streamlined the installation process and added some great new features alongside it.

• Improved mirror ranking supportincluding providing an optimized mirror list when the installer is offline
• Added hardware detection for all GPUs and VMs
• We are now installing additional drivers for all GPUsincluding Vulkan drivers and the necessary packages for hardware-accelerated video decoding when applicable
• GPU drivers are now loaded early by default
• This version also introduces a new tool, eos-hwtool. This is the tool used by the installer, and it is also now available to all EOS users to install and remove GPU drivers when needed.

A very noticeable change is also the slight increase in size of the ISO compared to Titan’s predecessors. It increased from about 3 GB to 3.4 GB. This increase has everything to do with the new features we shipped to create a smoother installation process and nothing to do with us adding a more “bloated” OS or DE experience. We’ve stayed true to our principles of providing a near-clean Linux experience, ready to adapt to your needs.

I hope you have fun with Titan, as we had fun creating it for you, and we’d like to thank all of our wonderful community members who have been involved in providing feedback on our forum/Telegram group, creating and testing this release. We think the world of you!

Titan is available for download on our homepage.