The long wait is over, Ganymede has arrived

Yes, we know it’s been a while since we released an ISO refresh. So, before I start the announcement, I want to get rid of a concern or rumor: our project is still active, and we are not going anywhere.

We still love what we do here, but we’ve all chosen to put our lives and loved ones first over the project. That certainly doesn’t mean we’ll let you down by letting the community hang in there and let our releases slow down. No, we are still active within the community, and our released ISO does receive the necessary updates regularly to keep the online installer running smoothly. It is only the live environment and the offline installer that are becoming obsolete.

And don’t get me wrong, we don’t underestimate the fact that those particular parts of our ISO need care, but it’s just a matter of preventing FOSS burnout. That’s it! We still love the project and our fantastic community around us.

Our lead developer, Joe, is still studying hard to be a certified programmer, in addition to his already busy life. And the latter actually applies to the whole team. There were also some unfortunate setbacks upstream to Arch Linux earlier this year, with their infrastructure being attacked, and some issues we struggled to resolve. But eventually Ganymede arrived.

Now that I’ve got all that out of the way, let’s dive into our latest ISO release.

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 Ganymede; If you update regularly, your system is fine.

The Ganymede release

The live environment and the offline installer are bundled with:

• Squids 25.11.1.9-1
• Firefox 145.0.1-1
• Linux 6.17.8.arch1-1
• Table 1:25.2.7-1
• xorg server 21.1.20-1 (xorg)
• Nvidia-utils 580.105.08-4

General Changes and new features to the installation process.

Nvidia – NVIDIA support has been greatly improved. Previously, the ISO always included the standard nvidia package by default. Now the system automatically detects the GPU during ISO boot and installs the correct driver – also not nvidia or nvidia-open.

Support for nvidia-open was added both to the ISO environment and to the installer. The detection process ensures that the appropriate modules are loaded in the live session and installed correctly on the target system.

In short, NVIDIA driver handling is fully automatic, supports both GPU families, and uses the correct modules for your GPU at each stage when booting ISO with the Nvidia boot option.

Broadcom wifi – The broadcom-wl wireless driver is no longer enabled by default on the ISO because it can cause other network devices to malfunction and lead to system issues.
If a Broadcom device is required broadcom-wl is detected, the live session will prompt the user with a pop-up to enable it. Once activated in the live environment, the installer will automatically detect it and install the driver on the target system as well.

EOS qogir icons – Upstream name updates were implemented for the Qogir icon sets to prevent broken EOS theme on the GTK-based DE and WM installations.

Desktop specific installation improvements

Plasma

• The Maliit virtual keyboard has been replaced with the Qt6 virtual keyboard for SDDM.
• Libappindicator-gtk3 has been replaced by Libappindicator.

GNOME

• Gnome screenshot has been removed from the default installation packages.

LXDE

• GTK3 postfixes have been removed from the package names.
• Obconf has been replaced by lxappearance-obconf-gtk3.
• Pacmanfm-gtk3 has been renamed by pacmanfm.

i3-WM

• Xbacklight has been replaced by brightnessctl.

Open issue

This one in particular was and still is the puzzles that we ultimately couldn’t solve for now.

Due to upstream Systemd boot changes, in some cases Windows 11 does not start when installed on a separate drive. However, it works with GRUB. When EndeavorOS is installed alongside Windows on the same drive, there are no problems. This only affects dual boot options on separate drives using Systemd boot.

We recommend following the instructions below for such cases, with a big shout out to @BS86

https://forum.endeavoros.com/t/tutorial-add-a-systemd-boot-loader-menu-entry-for-a-windows-installation-using-a-separate-esp-partition/37431

We want to thank the ISO testing group for their endless and careful testing of our release candidates over the past few months and our entire community for reporting bugs and thinking with us to fix them. And last but certainly not least @UncleSpellbinder for his amazing contribution in creating the Ganymede wallpaper.

The ISO can be downloaded from our website homepage.