EndeavourOS has been my daily driver for about 4 years - I'm a huge fan. A breeze to install, excellent community, and I like the QoL features/packages they've added.
Last time I tried an arch based "easy" installable distro it was a nightmare for me, this was probably 5 years ago. How likely am I to break my OS with EndeavourOS are there any things I should avoid? My interest in something like Arch is only in order to have access to more modern compilers and tools, as opposed to whatever is frozen in a Debian repo or whatever distro I'm using. I've been fine with POP but would like the flexibility that you get on Windows and Mac to use any version of a software.
> How likely am I to break my OS with EndeavourOS are there any things I should avoid?
If you have some Linux experience - unlikely I would say.
I'd suggest that you check https://archlinux.org/news/ from time to time, to see if there are any breaking changes / things that need manual intervention.
Asides from that, take care of your Pacnew files [1] and you should be good to go. EndeavourOS provides a "Welcome" application which makes this task simple.
Finally the EndeavourOS Forums are a super friendly place to get help in case you still manage to break something [2]
In addition to 7839284023's suggestions, if you're making regular backups and not performing partial updates, I think it's unlikely you'll tank your OS and if you do, you got the backups. You mentioned debian and things to avoid post-install - if you're looking for something as invaluable and concentrated as dontbreakdebian, you won't find it with Arch (outside of simply pointing to the wiki).
EndeavourOS has their own wiki . I get the impression they were/are attempting to translate the Arch wiki to a more succinct and ingestible format, but many of the articles are several years old so I'd recommend vetting those that are applicable to your use case.
> How likely am I to break my OS with EndeavourOS are there any things I should avoid?
The exact same chance Arch has to break something: so quite likely, as in, it's not a matter of IF, but a matter of WHEN. The exact WHEN being dependent on how unlucky you are.
I'm sure I'll get a dozen downvotes and replies from people saying they've been using Arch since the beginning of time and never had an issue, but a full update of EndevourOS left me without working sound. Not ideal considering I'm applying for jobs and need sound to work for interviews.
For that I need an OS that's 100% bulletproof, not something I need to read up tutorials, blogposts, newsletters, wikis, to learn how to manage, since I don't want another part time sys-admin job, I want something to JustWorks™ without any studies or maintenance.
For a secondary tinkering/learning machine it's a very nice OS since the documentation is also nice, but I would never daily drive it on a main machine that I use for earning a living.
Yup same, I was using it on my laptop that I fired up every 1 or 2 weeks and one update the bootloader broke so it was bye to Endeavor. I enjoyed it very much until then
I haven't tried to daily drive too many distros at home to draw any conclusion.
At work, Ubuntu was also a nightmare, OpenSUSE was pretty solid, and at home Windows never caused me any issues so I'll be sticking to that until I have more time to try out switching to Linux again, but I do like Nobara and TuxedoOS as JustWorks distros, though like I said, i never daily drove them do draw an conclusions
>Windows never caused you issues? That's an incredibly bold statement.
How so? It's not a fact, it's just how my experience was. Just because you had a different experience doesn't mean my experience was wrong or false, because like I said it's just my experience and not a fact and therefore it can neither be right or wrong.
As a free man, I will stick to whatever tool gave me the least issues and avoid those that have. Simple.
>I had to switch off of Windows because it was nothing but issues.
Good for you man. Remember, this isn't a competition, the OS is just a tool like your hammer or drill, not a religion, so nobody cares what your personal OS choices are what your reasons for your choices are, as long as you're happy with what you use that's all that matter, just don't judge others for their choices and reasons.