EndeavorOS Ganymede automatically installs NVIDIA drivers during setup

EndeavorOS has released Ganymede, an Arch-based distribution that during installation now detects the system GPU and installs the appropriate NVIDIA driver automatically.

The release includes kernel 6.17 and KDE Plasma 6.5.3, replaces the Maliit virtual keyboard with the Qt 6 virtual keyboard for KDE Plasma, and ships Mesa 25.2.7 and NVIDIA 580.105.08. Other stated updates are an improved Calamares installer, Firefox 145, and brightnessctl replacing Xbacklight for the i3 desktop. The distribution can be installed and used for free.

In hands-on testing the reviewer said the installer was point-and-click simple and completed in under five minutes, and praised the Welcome app and overall performance. The reviewer noted two shortcomings out of the box: there is no package-manager GUI by default (they installed Octopi with the command "yay -S octopi"), and Samba was nonfunctional because the Samba install lacked an smb.conf file, which the reviewer could not fix during troubleshooting.

The automatic driver setup applies only to NVIDIA cards, according to the coverage, and the reviewer concluded Ganymede is fast, beautiful and stable but advised users who require Samba to avoid Ganymede until the issue is resolved. The article also suggests downloading the ISO, creating a USB installer and testing the release on a spare machine for those interested.

Key Topics

Tech, Endeavoros, Ganymede, Nvidia, Arch Linux, Kde Plasma