The answer seems to be yes but I have not seen much detail on what works now and what does not. It also seems that device trees are required for each device and I have only seen that for one ASUS and one Lenevo so far.

If anybody knows more, I would love an update.

Just uninstall eos-hooks and then comment out the eos repos in pacman.conf if you want vanilla Arch. Pretty easy journey. You don’t even have to reboot.

EOS is about 24 additional packages on top of the 70,000 Arch already offers, many of which are already on the AUR ( like yay and paru ). EOS uses the real Arch kernel. Once installed, EOS is Arch in my view.

There are not “two updates”. It is not an OS over an OS. EOS is awesome but it is a glorified Arch installer with opinionated defaults.

Backed by a hardware reseller. Likely to be around as long as they stay in business.

What did you not like about EndeavourOS?

I went through this recently and was not able to resolve it. Unfortunately, it looks like there is no way to use Resolve with an iGPU.

I teach a class where I use VirtualBox. Students commonly use Windows or Mac. I use Linux.

It is very handily to use VirtualBox where, if I demo something, the same steps will work on the student machine. It is also nice for documentation if you want to show a screenshot.

I have never used the “extension pack” for this so it would be fine. Educational use seems to be permitted regardless.

I just looked all this over and, just to clarify, both VirtualBox itself and the Guest Additions are free and released under GPL3.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

What is not free is the separately downloadable “VirtualBox Extension Pack”.

As long as you stay away from the “Extension Pack”, you are ok.

While I agree with you, what is attractive about Manjaro that you want that EOS does not offer?

I also tend to see EndoeavourOS as a great Manjaro replacement because what I want is a high-quality, opinionated, and easy to install no-nonsense distro that offers a massive repository of very up-to-date software in its repos.

I used to think Manjaro looked better but I installed it recently and I did not like it as much as the default EOS look. Perhaps I am just conditioned.

The only thing that stands out for me that people might prefer about Manjaro is the graphical package management. Of course, it is a one-time, one line command to install the very same package manager in EOS that Manjaro uses. Does that disqualify EOS as a Manjaro replacement?

You may already know this but you can run OPNsense on top of Proxmox. That may mitigate the driver issues you are having.

BSD is well designed and cohesive but has many more missing bits and contraints than Linux. So, if you are in its sweet spot, it is awesome and maybe better than Linux. However, outside that it can be totally unusable.

For me, the biggest issue is the lack of software. There is both a mountain of it as it is of course an POSIX compatible OS and at the same time it is trivial to need important software that is missing.

As a desktop, it therefore feels very nice and also very limiting.

I love that it is actually real UNIX with an unbroken history back to the beginning. I find that really compelling. At the same time, I always get “bored” using it because it inevitably does not support what I want to do.

I am still hoping Chimera Linux finds a sweet spot that melds the two worlds in a nice way.

In what way?

The binary formats are not compatible, not even the format of the files themselves. Linux uses ELF. MacOS uses MachO.

True, macOS is more or less POSIX at the base but the API Mac applications are written to is not that at all ( Cocoa ). GNUstep exists for a reason. Sadly, it is not very mature. It is certainly not a trivial undertaking though as there have been a number of attempts over decades and nobody has really pulled it off.

The Win32 API on the other hand has largely been implanted on Linux. A few Win32 APIs are even being added to the kernel.

Going the other way is easier. You can port POSIX stuff to macOS fairly easily.

What I am most excited for in COSMIC is the promise of tiling in a full DE. I like the idea that you can switch back and forth.

I started trying it out a month or so ago. Still pretty incomplete. Promising though.

The fact that it may drive the Rust GUI ecosystem forward is exciting as well. I do not need to see everything re-written in Rust but it will be great if Rust is a realistic option for new app dev.

Depends on your point of view.

Their motivation was “we have a vision for our UX and GNOME won’t let us do it — so let’s write our own.”

It was only after deciding to write their own that they decided to write it in Rust.

They like Rust, but that is not what motivated them to make COSMIC.