EndeavourOS Titan released, devs comment on age verification laws

The Arch-based Linux distribution EndeavourOS Titan is out now, bringing with it plenty of nice sounding upgrades and some comments on age verification.

With lots of the Linux / FOSS community not happy about all the age verifications laws appearing, more distributions have been chiming in to give their thoughts. So it's pleasing to see the EndeavourOS devs also comment on this too. Here's what they said in the release announcement:

Like many of you, we were surprised by the news last week, and questions quickly followed about our position on this matter. We just have to wait to see how this will develop for FOSS and Linux in general. It isn’t easy for us to make a clear statement on it at this moment, because this decision involves not only the distros but also DE/WM environments, software packages and mirror networks. Like Arch, we don’t have any infrastructure to track how many users download or install our system, let alone who is running Endeavour on their machines. Besides the fact that it goes against FOSS fundamentals, we simply don’t have the manpower or resources to take on this near-impossible task.

Also, in creating this law, not a single person or entity from the FOSS world was represented or heard, and there is still a window of opportunity open to address the concerns for open source software and Linux/Freebsd systems before the law takes effect. After the news dropped, the OSI, FSF, and Linux Foundation must have realised their mistake in not reacting in time and hopefully will come into action for the many distributions and other FOSS projects, like us, that don’t have Californian or US legal representation. So, all eyes are on them, because Colorado and the rest of the world are next… We are not blaming any of the organisations mentioned by the way. We are just pointing out that the law isn’t set in stone, yet.

Hopefully these new laws won't hit too hard, but it will be very interesting to see what the major Linux distributions makers and desktop environments like KDE Plasma and GNOME do to fit in with it. Hopefully the laws won't cause too many problems.

As for what's new with the Titan release, for the live installer and offline installs it now ships with:

• Calamares 26.03.1.3-1
• Firefox 148.0-1
• Linux 6.19.6.arch1-1
• Mesa 1:26.0.1-1
• Xorg-server 21.1.21-1 (xorg)
• Nvidia-utils 590.48.01-4

And some other improvements made elsewhere:

• Improved mirror ranking support, including providing an optimised mirror list when the installer is offline
• Added hardware detection for all GPUs and VMs
• We are now installing additional drivers for all GPUs, including Vulkan drivers and the needed packages for hardware-accelerated video decoding when applicable
• GPU drivers are now being loaded early by default
• This release also introduces a new tool, eos-hwtool. This is the tool being used by the installer, and it is also available now to all EOS users to install and remove GPU drivers whenever needed.

Considering all the issues with Manjaro right now, EndeavourOS seems like a good choice if you want an Arch-based Linux distributions.