If you want something that “just works” any Arch base won’t be a good idea in my opinion. I love Arch but there will be certain things to figure out from time to time and for someone with little experience they can be tough! For you usecase I would recommend Fedora, that’s a lot more up to date but not a rolling realease and tends to just work for me.

The out of date package problem you’re running into is because Mint is based on the LTS version of Ubuntu. This means that it’s set up for long term service and stability. All well and good if that’s what you’re after.

As to your problem, I’m not big on Endeavor - or any Arch based distro - for folks who are new to Linux. Unless you’re willing to take the time to use Arch itself and set up your system, and learn how it all comes together, you’re better off not using Arch. I know I’ll get shouted down for this, but IMHO, all of the easy install Arch based distros are terrible for people new to linux.

If your biggest issue is that the software versions aren’t as up to date as you’d like, then all you really need to do is switch to a non-LTS. I’d recommend Fedora. I use it myself, and it’s easy to set up, works great out of the box, and is up to date. They come out with a new version twice a year, and upgrades run smoothly.

If you’re really focused on a rolling release, though, I’d suggest looking at OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It’s rolling, super stable, and has a fantastic community. Their Yast tools are famous and really impressive.

Alternately, take the time to install a proper Arch setup. You’ll learn a ton, and find out that all that maintenance stuff you feel like you don’t have time to do isn’t that big a deal, really.

Here’s the thing with Arch-based distros: they aren’t more stable than Arch, and Arch breaks. Fixing Arch is often possible, but requires Terminal skills. You mentioned you want Arch because of the AUR, why not try Distrobox? It’s a tool for integrating containers (and their apps) with the “base” system. With a few commands, create an Arch container, then just use your favourite AUR wrapper (like yay or pacman) as you would on a regular Arch system and you may need to run `distrobox-export ’ in the container. Your apps will just show up like any other apps.

Endeavour is fairly easy to run and maintain, aside from not having a GUI package manager installed by default (I say this as someone who has been running it for about 2 years now, and still considers themselves a Linux noob)

One underrated feature is the Welcome tab, which also notifies you if there’s some critical error in the latest update so that you know to use caution and take certain steps when updating

Other than that, running yay or sudo pacman -Syu is most of the maintenance you’ll need to do

I use EndeavourOS and OpenSuse tumbleweed myself, and I’d caution you about using endeavour. It’s a great OS that I personally love but there will be manual interventions you’ll have to keep track of, and implement. Maybe twice yearly. Like the grub issue, or the repo migration for two recent examples.

OpenSuse tumbleweed however is a rolling release distro that’s more stable, takes little in the way of manual interventions, and is quite sleek out of the box. I use it as a work partition for freelance dev work personally.

I love endeavour, but it can take some more babysitting than other distros as it’s essentially just a really good graphical arch installer

My honest opinion is it is a nice Arch based distro with a gui installer

I am very happy with Endeavour, have been using it for two years now and have had no problems with it.

Is EndeavourOS a solid choice?

Anything that’s Arch based is only solid if that’s the way you will drive the system.

Endeavour is way better than Manjaro since it uses the Arch repos, instead of having parallel repos and delaying a week the updates, so is basically Arch with a Gui installer. Still, tough I understand the appeal to install Arch that way, I think that Endeavour may carry with the hand people that are tech illiterated in the Arch world during the installation, and then it simply abandon they in a system where if you don’t know how it works you will definitely break it. The good part of the long and painful Arch installation process is that it teaches the user about the system.

Anyway, since nowadays Arch has a functional easy installer, Endeavour is kind of pointless to me.

I’ve been using it since it succeeded Antergos (2019ish) and I’ve really enjoyed it, I use it on most of my systems! It has really sane defaults and makes for a good Arch experience that doesn’t involve setting things up yourself. If you like XFCE, they have the best out of the box theming I’ve seen a distro have for it, but there are other DEs that you can pick (I think you need internet access during the install IIRC).

It has its own repository that has some nice apps in it (like AUR helpers). The community around the distro is also really good, whenever I’ve come across an issue posted on the forums everyone seems really chill and noob friendly.

Other than that, it’s basically a GUI Arch installer (an amazing one at that!) that doesn’t get in your way and it just works. There’s been probably one problem, in the four years I’ve used it, that wasn’t caused by me breaking things (the grub incident), but the distro’s response to that was very well done.

The only other distros I use are Arch and Debian, but EndeavourOS is always my recommendation for people newer to Linux. It just works.

EndevourOS is excellent. It has been very stable for me. It is easy to install. Your problem will not be out of date packages for sure.

That said:

• there is no graphical package management. You will need to use command line ( yay / pacman ) or TUI ( pacseek ) tools.
• there are A LOT of package updates and you will want to stay current with them. I update my packages multiple times per week.

If either of those things bother you, they may be a problem.

Updating packages is reliable and painless but a chore you need to get in the habit of doing. I suspect you would get more problems if you let it go too long. On the upside, as it is a rolling release, you never have an “upgrade” to go through.

“Always configuring” isn’t what Arch requires. It requires you to be tolerant of every so often dealing with a bug or two. Currently, the Arch-packaged version of Waybar has a regression which prints fractional seconds when using %T or %S specifiers. A tad annoying, and I could fix it by switching to waybar-git, where it’s been patched. But that hasn’t hit my threshold of annoyance, as I bounce between Sway and KDE.

The grub issue was a bigger deal, and while I knew how to resolve it (liveboot → lsblk and fdisk -l got me all the info I needed, then cryptsetup, mount -o subvol=@, arch-chroot, grub-install) the EOS blog had a nice guide.

But the reason why I chose it? Firewalld and Pipewire by default, customizable welcome app, and pretty simple otherwise.

NixOS will probably fully convert me in a year or two, but I’ve greatly enjoyed my time on Endeavour.

I’ve been using it for a while now. It’s generally good. I’ve been facing random system crash issues during gaming or using Firefox or background steam. I have an amd 6800xt and don’t have this issue on fedora.

It’s a solid choice for a lot of the reasons you mentioned. I used it for a long time before switching over to regular Arch and I still use it as a live USB to recover my Arch install or to rollback to an older BTRFS snapshot.

I will say though that it is sorta barebones enough it essentially becomes a gateway drug to regular Arch. If you’re curious, you might want to check out the official archinstall installer that’s bundled with the official Arch iso. It really makes it quite easy to get a working Arch install up and running.

Pretty awesome experience; if you’re new to Arch and Linux are both great ways combined to learn about it. It did break on me but nothing super problematic.

If you don’t auto update or update weekly you’ll have a pretty fine experience.

I picked it to enforce me to learn the way of Linux and or Arch specific since the aur and wiki are pretty nice.

Though do come from relative mild Linux experience and a great Windows knowledge from my job as sysadmin.

Do wanna see how I could incorporate more Linux into my environment for tasks.

It’s my favorite Linux distro nowadays. It has the DIY element of Arch but without the complexities of its installation process. Effectively that has allowed me to use it as a daily driver on my main machine, but also a stripped down OS for an emulation console with a wide selection of packages. I wasn’t happy with the whole grub fiasco, but the fix was easy and it was nice to see that they added systemd-boot as an option. Overall, it’s pretty easy for me to recommend.