What’s a beginner to do

Well that’s just it; Endeavour is not a beginner distro. It’s not designed to be. Endeavour is Arch with a graphical installer and some modest quality of life improvements for users who are otherwise willing to trawl through the Arch wiki for answers. The welcome app really just seems to be there so that you don’t have to memorize all the commands or set up aliases, etc, if you don’t want to.

So when you ask “am I supposed to X,” the answer is that there really isn’t a set-in-stone workflow to accomplish anything on EOS or Arch; what you’re supposed to do is read the manual, so to speak, and decide for yourself how you want to go about things.

Unlike some other Arch based distros like BlendOS and Manjaro, Endeavour is still very much a DIY distro.

Don’t use GUI package managers, but here, have some GUI package managers.

What GUI package managers are you referring to? EOS doesn’t supply any.

AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.

If I’m not mistaken, this is all stuff you should also be doing on Arch. The single difference is that EOS provides a button in their “Welcome” app that will helpfully run a command for you in a terminal for some of these tasks.

To be fair, the ternary operator can get messy.

Why not try simple scripts at first? You could write a little script in Bash, JS, or Ruby to create folders or text files. Besides the very basic stuff I did on the high school robotics team, my first programming project was when I worked as a print broker and we invested in a digital press. I needed a program to calculate the cost of a print job, so I learned a little BASIC and wrote a program on my TI-98 to do it for me. It would ask a series of questions (eg - paper cost, single / double sided, color / black and white, how many imposed on an SRA3 sheet, etc) and spit out the cost of the job.

As for how you use the code, say you write a ruby script; to run it, you’d navigate to the script directory in the terminal and type ./scriptName.rb to run it. If you’re using a compiled language, you’d compile it (your lessons would cover how to do this) and then you’d run the resulting binary the same way.

There are lots of older KDE apps that could use some TLC.

I just use plasma panels these days

Neat

Can confirm

Also, the community around a distro makes a difference. I don’t think that the EndeavourOS community has quite the lofty expectations of its users that Arch users do, so getting help might be a bit more pleasant.

My understanding is that a good desktop environment experience also relies on distro maintainers packaging things in a timely manner, et cetera.

I can see that too. For me, coming to GNU/Linux as a windows power user, with Gnome, I just felt so limited and unempowered. Switching to Plasma helped me feel in control of my machine.

It’s easy to use, just works, and I like some of the tools it comes with like the graphics driver manager and the kernel manager. It also has a ton of packages, and gets new software quickly as it’s based on Arch. I’ve read all the old anti-manjaro posts / essays, but for my use case, it was solid for years and none of the common complaints affected me. When I first switched to Linux full time, it’s what I used and I never regretted the decision. I have since switched to EndeavourOS, just to be certain about AUR compatibility, but even so, I didn’t have any issues there on Manjaro. It’s still installed on my partner’s computer, and Pamac let’s them run updates without learning commands (which they would forget, because they’re not on the computer often).

Maybe Fedora Kinoite instead?

Seconding KDE. Imo new users will avoid a lot of frustration with Plasma.

I wouldn’t say so - it requires terminal use.

I’m an EndeavourOS user and I love it, but I wouldn’t call it beginner friendly

I feel so alone in my love for Manjaro :[

I love ktorrent

Good reasons! Thanks!

Agreed. I’ve been designing professionally since 2009, and have switched my workflow to 100% FLOSS tools. Scribus, Inkscape, and Krita are suitable for professional work these days.