hello endeavourOS
(Originally written on the 19th of September already)
I’ve been growing increasingly annoyed at Windows (at this point, it feels to me like there is barely anyone who isn’t!). I’ve tried a dual boot in 2015 and pretty much failed. I was planning to run Windows 7 and either elementaryOS or Ubuntu LTS on a little cheap laptop for university. But after each update, no matter if Windows or Grub updated, everything broke. I gave up at some point and just reinstated Windows completely.
Had a lot of fun with the Desktop mode on the Steam Deck – I have my dock and sometimes hook it up to external screens and it works reasonably well. SteamOS on the Deck is based on Arch Linux with KDE Plasma. I really enjoyed that, but wanted more – a bit more freedom to tinker without the fear of breaking Steam or running games on the console.
So I’ve decided to dualboot my laptop. I sometimes still use products by Adobe or Autodesk, and some games do not work for Linux, as well as some smaller creative software like Decker is a bit messy on Linux to compile from source – at least I honestly don’t get it. I’ve also set up my Odin Project VM on Windows and don’t wanna redo that.
My process was the following:
- Clearing up my SSD from unneeded stuff. Deinstalled games I can just easily and quickly reinstall when needed, cleared my Downloads folder (16GB!), removed some files that were leftover from games, cleared my bin, went through all my pictures and folders to declutter and deinstalled some other software. 50GB of free space turned into 350GB.
- Making a free partition for endeavorOS in Windows. The issue was it barely let me shrink the Windows partition due to unmovable files. This is well documented online and a reason for it are usually the hibernation files. I removed hibernation and those files (defragmentation etc. didn’t do anything, but I tried for good measure) and was able to shrink 100GB when it previously was a measly 4GB or so. I still would have liked a larger partition since this is a 1TB SSD, but better than nothing.
- Creating the bootable USB via Rufus. Funnily enough, that one still had the Ubuntu on it from back then.
- Disabling the TPM (Intel Platform Trust Technology) and Secure Boot in the UEFI. I kinda didn’t realize this is the PIN you set in Windows and that turning it off would mess with that. I almost locked myself out of my Windows account with this move because Windows was confused why the PIN is now gone, but I was able to reset the code via the Microsoft account/email. After the reset, I had a PIN that wasn’t tied to the UEFI TPM, since it was still turned off there.
- Changing the boot order to boot from USB.
- Going through with the installation with Calamares.
I’ve had some issues with the installation. I initially aimed to set the home and swap partitions myself and use the existing Windows EFI partition for eOS, but it was only 260MB. I didn’t want to install Grub, which would have fit, and wanted systemd instead, which needs over 500MB (now I know why people say it is bloated as hell!). There was no way for me to make the EFI partition larger without cutting into Windows files, so I settled for a second EFI partition specifically for eOS.
I was kinda overwhelmed with going off of the plan I had with the EFI that so many guides showed, so instead I settled for the installation option to simply install eOS on that free partition, no manual partitioning. Now even though I set EFI Partition to New on this setting, the first time around it installed eOS entirely without an EFI partition and it wasn’t bootable. So I tried again, same stuff as before, and now it did.
Since then everything has been flawless and I am happy. I riced it a bit and I am still working on setting up neovim with NvChad and make it ready for Rust development, but it’s taking a bit of time. My dog also died in the meantime, so my art projects and coding are on a break right now.
The stuff I use daily just works, which is nice. LibreOffice is good enough for my uses, Aseprite, Virtual Cottage and Kind Words all work. Stardew Valley works (but I’ve kept it on Windows for now and don’t wanna install it twice).
I’m thinking of changing my rice a bit in the near future; I’ve made it fancy now, with a nice background, some transparency and blur, customized neofetch, catpucchin etc. but, especially the skins I have on Discord and Spotify are bothering me a bit now. They are a tad slow this way. I may do a really old school looking rice and a black background, and use spotify-tui to debloat the Spotify interface.
