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¶ Introduction
Endless OS undergoes constant development and you may wish to explore, evaluate or test what is coming up in a future version.
This can be done by following the following procedure to switch your Endless OS installation to use the development branch, known as master.
Please be aware of the following considerations before continuing:
- The development branch is only intended for developers and technicians. It is not intended for regular usage of Endless OS.
- No technical support is offered for development versions of Endless OS.
- This branch is volatile and unpredictable. It may be broken at any given time, which could result in an unbootable or an unusable system.
- The branch is updated several times per week. Even if it works today, it may break tomorrow.
- Worse case breakage could include loss of your data or documents - do not use this version of Endless OS for your personal documents or other production tasks, unless you have good backups.
- This should be viewed as a one-way migration. Once you switch to the development version, you should not expect to be able to switch back to the stable version.
¶ Requirements
You must be running Endless OS 4 or newer to perform the transition below. You must have admin access to your computer.
¶ Procedure
- Open the Terminal; this is where you will enter the following commands.
- Select Endless's development repository by running the following command:
pkexec eos-stage-ostree dev - Wait for an OS update to the latest nightly build of the stable OS branch to be installed in the background. You can monitor this in the App Center's Updates tab, or with
eos-updater-ctlin the Terminal. - Once the OS update is installed, reboot your computer.
- Open the Terminal again.
- Switch to the master branch with the following command:
pkexec ostree admin switch os/eos/amd64/master - Reboot your computer again.
- Open Terminal and run
ostree admin statusto verify that the active ostree is using the master refspec, e.g.:* eos 792503a09a3ef48a7c11e5447a33c7a3ceab6f0c2b06c68f30f0019e47d40c43.0 Version: 4.0.0~210601-230012 origin refspec: eos:os/eos/amd64/master [...]
If you are using Endless OS on Raspberry Pi or another ARM single-board computer, replace
amd64witharm64in theostree admin switchcommand above.
¶ Notes
It is inadvisable but possible to craft commands to switch back to the stable ostree (e.g. using the prod ostree stage and the original branch that your stable system was running before the update). However, if you do this, you should be prepared for some possible problems. Notably, if any data or configuration was migrated to a new format (with or without your knowledge) by the new version of Endless OS, this may cause difficulties for the old version when you switch back.
Even though technical support is not available for the development version, we would appreciate your feedback on the Development category of the Community Forums, especially if you can accompany any problem reports with any suggested solutions.