Garuda Linux

I am perfectly content with my setup in Arch, but sometimes I see a distro that catches my eye. This is another Arch spinoff distro, also aimed at new and inexperienced Linux users, while also focusing heavily on performance.

https://garudalinux.org/index.html

It comes in multiple flavors, meaning that you can have many different desktop environments, including all the well known ones like Cinnamon, KDE, Xfce, GNOME and more. There is even an installer for i3wm, and a barebones installer which I assume only provides you with a console interface and you are left to install and configure everything on your own (almost like Arch).

The one that caught my eye was the KDE Dr460nized version, which is the one they seem to promote.



I don't want to switch distro on my computer, but I do want to test this one out, so I will install it in Virtualbox and see how it is. I'll post some more, along with screenshots of my own, after I have tried it out.

So I decided to go ahead and test it on real hardware instead of just using Virtualbox. Installed it on my Surface Pro 4, and was in all honesty a bit disappointed. It seems to aim for being an "easy" distro, but from what I could tell it does not do that job well. What I found annoying was that it seemed unclear what was automated by the distro, and what the user needs to manually fix. After I changed the display scaling, because the Surface Pro 4 has a HiDPi screen, the clock widget disappeared and I had to add it back again. I don't see the logic of removing the clock widget just because I changed the display scaling.

Furthermore, after install you are presented with the option to upgrade to Ultimate edition, which presented some dialogues asking you what additional software you want installed. Each dialogue specificed additional, and I didn't select any additional browsers since Firefox was already installed. But after this, I had an icon for Librewolf browser on the application launcher, which didn't work because it was not installed. The Firefox icon had been removed. Additionally, I suddenly had the classic "missing character" symbol appearing on the system bar on the top when no windows were open.

And performance, which was quite smooth to begin with, suddenly became horrible. I don't know what changed it, I had barely had the thing installed for half an hour and was still just looking around when suddenly stuff started to become unresponsive.

From my experience, I can't really recommend this distro. I feel like it still has some issues to iron out. Besides, I am always a bit skeptical of any distro that is based on Arch Linux. Arch by default requires manual system maintenance from the user, that is by design. If an Arch based distro is attempting to be "easy", there is a lot to manage for the distro devs. Especially since Arch is rolling release with new versions of software coming all the time.

But, it sure does look sweet, if you are into the neon style theme.

I have no idea why I was getting bad performance, the Surface Pro is actually quite good for such a small computer. It might just have been some issue with the Surface's unusual hardware. But I've had no problems running Debian on the Surface, which is what I'll be reinstalling on it.

It worked well until I performed a system update and upgraded to the Ultimate edition. But I also switched the desktop scaling at the same time, so I honestly don't know what might have contributed to the issues. In the end, I didn't feel motivated to try to figure it out. I felt like the biggest disappointment was the fact that it felt kind of half-baked in how much is automated vs. how much is left to the user to take care of.

As for Mint, I find it to be exceptionally well maintained. I even installed it on my mom's laptop, which is quite old. It still handles the Cinnamon desktop without issues. Besides, Mint does it right in that you are not required to fix stuff yourself. A system update on Mint handles stuff for you properly.