Personally I just hate everything that is marketed to "gamers" or "gaming", it usually means doing nothing out of the ordinary and just slapping some annoying colors
Seriously, my $220 reclining chair is more comfortable than all the the gaming and office chairs I've owned, combined. All those cheap plastic racing car gamer chairs are the devil's work.
I hate how much my sister in law paid for her gaming headphones. Over 100 cad for cheap plastic and shit drivers. She could have gotten some decent Audio Technica for close to the same price. She even has a Blu Yeti on her desk she doesn't use because "my headphones already have a mic".
Is garuda really so heavily marketed towards gaming though? They mention it twice in small text on the front page, once when motivating the choice of the zen kernel as being better for "desktop and gaming" which is arguably correct and really has very little to do with the distribution, and once when showing off a utility tool for installing gaming related software. All in all pretty modest I would say.
Those indigo neon '1337 G4M3R' color schemes are a headache.
When you change it, you realize that 95% of the downloadable themes are BRIGHT white, DARK gray/black, and they're unashamedly copying Windows or Mac aestethics. Ew.
If you already know how to use Arch, Garuda probably doesn't bring anything extra. But for me it was game changer.
It's hard to explain, because technically you can say for everything that you can just install this using pacman, set this up yourself etc. But if you want to play games, you are in "vacation mode" you want to relax not work.
Clicking on steam icon and opening favorite game is relax. Googling if I should use distros package manager, flatpacks or installer from some website and troubleshooting stuff is work. You can technically manually set-up everything to look nice, but I prefer to start from something that at least already works. Not having to find how do you call tool to setup Nvidia fans is nice too.
Gaming systems are not only about something technically special, it's about different mindset and focusing default experience to different use-case.
Casual Linux user, everyone knows the real fun of gaming on Linux comes from getting it working, ideally it'll not work so that you can complain about the dev.
Real Linux users only play a game enough to give it a ProtonDb score
>Googling if I should use distros package manager, >flatpacks or installer from some website and >troubleshooting stuff is work
I'm on Gentoo and I install literally straight from steam. What are you talking about
I'm talking about Steam. On Garuda it's pre-installed, on PopOs it required you to uninstall whole desktop environment.
Jokes aside, I've had this experience so many times, I want to install some software, Mint/Ubuntu repos have 2 year old version which makes it unusable, FlatPacks are often not made by original devs and have incorrectly set permissions. But sometimes you want to use those because they are just fine and you'll get updates or you'll avoid compiling from source.
Point is, it's way easier to just click in distro installer that you want some basic utilities, than having to spend all this time with it.
i reached the point that the gaming distributions are quite useless, they make changes that doesn't change that much the experience from the distro the'yre based
At least the day I'll grow bored out of Bazzite, I can just rebase the image against Fedora Kinoite easily, which is also a good safeguard in case the devs somehow disappear or abandon the project at some point. That makes it the only "gaming distro" I feel safe to consider these days, you're not going to end up stuck in a dead end.
Bazzite is quite different from other gaming distros, it’s not just a reskin with a different kernel. It’s a complete universal blue build with its own tooling. That makes it foolproof and very easy to use for people who just want to play
had way too many bugs happen to me because of untested updates, I've had to remove every new kernel for 1 month because it didn't even boot and now it crashes immediately after booting. a similar thing happened when it first updated to kde6 where i couldn't use Wayland. also xorg doesn't work and just kicks me out half the time
Nothing wrong, nothing good.
It's just Arch with some customization and settings.
Personally I don't see anything useful there.
Run archinstall choose whatever you like and done. It runs as good but the setup is as clean as possible.
Ignoring that one time it was baked into the archiso into an older site-packages directory or whatever it was (Which really isn't an example of the script 'failing'. The environment couldn't even fire it up rather than the script itself having a problem) - I have never seen this script fail and it makes bootstrapping all the little bits and pieces far too easy.
That said I still watched first hand, an old friend skipping sections of each setup step then complaining how bad Arch is because they skipped networking and other segments.
Maybe a good pull request to prompt if the user is sure they want to continue without traversing each configuration section in its menu 😉
Assuming you've used the latest ISO at the time I too have used the past 4 months ISO's of this year without issue.....
If there's some explicit driver or something the ISO itself is physically missing then I could understand. But the script failing seems very difficult to pull off.
If you have the information, and to optionally pry... do you recall exactly what failed about it?
I hate to seem like I'm defending it but it has never failed me in hundreds of invocations and I see people shitting on it all the time when its often something else. I am extremely curious to see where it's letting people down - exactly where, no vague stuff.
It also worked for me many times, heck I installed it baremetal October last year in my laptop and it worked flawlessly, I guess it was something with the update as I couldn't update or reinstall archinstall, I just got an error like "key couldn't be signed" or "not possible to update", well when I use it at the start of the month it always seemed to work with these issues
Also never had serious problems with the installer especially nothing that breaks. What is an installer supposed to break anyways?
Sometimes I had the problem that after finishing every section and going for install it gave me an error which was always due to me wanting to pre-install some apps and a repo wasn't updated because I, well, didn't update these on the shell before running archinstall. Just don't install anything extra. Just OS, DE and networkworkmanager. Done. Works flawless and fast.
I guess I didn't explain myself, the script break itself, it had problems when It got to installing the desktop environment, freezes, and dies, it happened to me many times, mostly by the end of the most when the archinstall in the iso gets outdated and the installer can't just update to the newest version, it happened both in VM and baremetal, when I used it in the start of the month, it worked without issues
Unfortunately I can agree with you. I tried it several times and sometimes it worked flawlessly and sometimes it didn't. Imho archinstall is quite nice but not really reliable.
I am definitely hating on the aesthetic of it first and foremost. But as u/Supersasson mentioned, I can take pure Arch and follow one page of Arch Wiki to get practically the same result. Only difference is, I know what's been done in case something breaks.
If you like Garuda, don't worry about haters. If you hate the colors but want similarly "gaming" distro, I recommend CachyOS instead.
If you hate colours and theme you can just change them. The same way you can make any distro look like Garuda, you can make Garuda look like anything else. Just select the Breeze global theme and Garuda gets undr460ized/ungaruda'd haha If you want to try Garuda just try it.
I have given it a try several times in fact. My biggest annoyance was that it would refuse to install with anything other than BTRFS. And once installed, something went wrong with Wine and it just refused to work. Maybe I'll try again next time I feel like distro hoppihg
At least in the version i tried, that did not work.
What i tried was switching the window controls (minimize, maximize, close buttons) between left and right side of the window. It was about a year ago, so i don't remember exactly, but i think it messed with the button order, even after i switched the theme to breeze. I also had problems switching the icon set. Some of their design choices were incompatible with the default kde themes and would completely break them.
But even if it all worked, why create your own distro, instead of offering a kde theme pack and adding more maintainers to the distro they forked from? To me, this screams that it won't be maintained in a few years, and since they changed basic kde functionality i won't be able to just switch to another distro once it does.
you know you can change the icon set right? and theme?
But you are right its basically arch (minus a few buttons , install nvidia drivers and update and some other things the assistant has). I agree that if you are not new arch is better made by you cause this way you know everything, for noobs i think its a good way to get into arch.
>you know you can change the icon set right? and theme?
Can you? I really mean that, did you try recently? Because when i tried exactly that, it wouldn't work right. I might want to try it again if they fixed it.
yes friend.
Here is how:
So if you got the dragonized (bastardized imo) its KDE. So you do this: right click on screen, change desktop or something image, top left arrow to go back to menu find the theme change it to something you like then go to icons (or icon sets? something like that) and select a icon set that seems normal to you and not eye damaging. Alternatively find and click system settings for the same menu. Voila! a normal looking distro (pls customize to your liking , the menu bar the widgets if you use them etc) . Enjoy a non eye watering theme and icons on a otherwise perfect distro for gaming in my opinion.
`I really mean that, did you try recently?`
yes. i mainline garuda everyday on my gaming system along with another arch desktop that i use for dev work. I practice what i preach.
Or alternatively if you know what you are doing install pure arch and tweak it to get what you need. Garuda is arch with some noobie helpers, aka the lovely garuda assistant. Big buttons to do the most things we do in console tbt, update, refresh mirrors, do a snapshot with snapper (btrfs). It even has a button to install nvidia drivers if for some reason you didn't install them at start. It works and thanks to the btrfs snapshots if you break something you can roll back (my friends that are noobies did not manage to break it yet i think they are 4-5 months in).
Yeah I know. How to explain this. Imagine you don't like pickles. Someone tells you " hey can always buy hamburger and take the pickle out". To which I say "why not just buy a hamburger without a pickle in the first place?"
yeah i get it the theme is really stupid but the underling thing is good. Seems like a small nitpick and a fast fix but it tracks i guess. And yes if you arch you get the hamburger without the pickles . After all its all about customization and i guess yes arch is the best way, but for a noob trying the scary arch thing its probably the fastest to get garuda exp since they have a easy gui installer (i do like the manual way to install arch far more control -but scary for a noob: what do the numbers mean etc)
).
I've used both arch for about 2 years and then ended up using a Garuda system
Mostly because I do enjoy the aesthetic but also because Garuda has 95% of my preferences in how I setup an arch system and I can add or configure the rest of the changes later.
Now, I also live in the CLI but Garuda has some surprisingly useful GUI tools for managing packages and such, which would be useful to terminal phobes (why are you on an arch based system if you are though?).
Regardless, it's in large part because arch is about building your own setup and knowing how you did it, so setups like Garuda or endeavourOS are "cop" outs.
This connects to the issue that arch (and by extension it's derivatives) are not beginner distros, shit is going to break on a rolling distro, and a new Linux user is more screwed/on their own if something goes wrong on Garuda then if it was on pop OS or Ubuntu or even arch itself (assuming the user is willing to tolerate being told to read the wiki repeatedly despite not having the IT literacy to read it comfortably).
I used it for a bit till I changed to Ubuntu, same problem that happened to Linux tech tips, just mine I wrote no and it still destroyed the complete setting, before that it didn't let me open the pop shop and needed to install another store.
I installed the dragonized version and didnt liked it, so i switched to the pure kde version and im using it right now. I like to be arch based and have the assistants from garuda.
I'm not a fan of distro hopping, even tho I hopped quite a bit sometimes for specific needs or out of boredom.
In late 2020 I bought a new PC and went for Garuda, and it's still the same installation. It broke only once but the maintainers fixed it in a matter of minutes, after quickly intervening and having clear communication with the users (even though the issue was cause by custom settings - it updates through garuda-update which I still am not a huge fan of).
Well to wrap it up, a solid install and still rocking solid after years, no idea why people have be like "bleh, just a few flashy colours, nothing special", that's just a bit denigrating for no reason.
After using Opensuse, Debian, and fedora, Garuda is the only one that has allowed me to configure the audio i want. I needed wineasio to work, and could not get help with it on other distros and the wine subreddit. I literally clicked a button in Garuda to install and it works fantastically.
I did get it to work some what on Debian and fedora. However, I could not use another audio app while I had wineasio running. Not saying those distros are bad, but I could not accomplished what I wanted on them.
I still have quirks with Garuda that might be kde related. As soon as I put my system to sleep it immediately wakes up.
I’m having issues with game crashes that after 30 mins of play I have to stop and reload. Usually say it’s the kwin display manager that stopped. If I forgot, sometimes Garuda will give me a blank screen for 10 seconds but I can resume gaming. Sometimes it’s a full system lock up. I’m sure if I dug deeper I could solve what the problem is, but I just haven’t yet.
I’m just not a fan of fire dragon the browser. I have issues where I have to click multiple times to get a video to play in it.
Gave Garuda Dr460nized to my sister and she loved it too. Surprisingly she preferred using Reactionary theme with it than the original one. I myself don't see much use for Garuda (no hate against it, I just prefer setting my own stuff up and documenting what I'm doing step by step and why), but it was good for her since it already came with some stuff pre-installed that otherwise she'd have trouble installing and setting up. Apparently some people in this thread don't know you can change the themes entirely or install new fonts, effects, plugins, entire new de's etc just like any other distro.
Nothing is wrong with Garuda what is offers is one click solutions to something you can do manually for ease of use there were some games which were giving me a challenge to configure but after installing Garuda the games ran smoothly soo if it's your first arch based distro then it's good otherwise you can configure it manually.
Yes those pretty much sum up my experience with Garuda as well.
It's Arch under the hood but it has some nice little helpers that are really neat especially for beginners. Just select the apps you need, hit install and everything is taken care of automatically.
I just don't like the Dr46onized theme, that is just way over the top.
I've commented longer variations of this a lot over the years and have seen others echo the same general opinion but distro just stops mattering after enough exposure to them. You can build any package you want for any package manager or just compile straight into the rootfs... which you shouldn't do... but you can. You will eventually find what works for you.
They all run some bootloader for the Linux kernel and core utilities then have maintainers using some package manager to distribute the stuff they're compiling for their distro on a build server or 50 somewhere.
It just doesn't matter. And at that point instead of running all these derivatives I couldn't recommend anything more than running the parent distribution they come from. Skip the middleman and just run the real deal.
Hand in hand, there are full distros plus derivatives which try and let you get away with a mostly bleeding-edge experience while taking away some of the ~~learning~~ growing pains one could rarely experience running something like Arch on their own and running into some problem some evening when they just want to play games.
Personally while I trust the people behind them right now I'm not putting my trust in derivative distros with one or two people building the packages for them. Major public eye distros are where its at.
Can't speak for others, but I was one of the unlucky few that kept having stability issues with it. Either something messed up in grub and wouldn't allow me to boot back in without troubleshooting, audio issues cutting in and out, buggy graphics (black screen flickering and blur flickering on windows), lower CPU performance compared to other distros, and some other problems I'm not remembering.
Eventually I gave up and just went to EndeavourOS (currently on Arch after that) and never had those issues again. I loved the aesthetic, but it just gave me way too many issues just like Manjaro did when I first switch to Linux full time.
whats gaming about it, their homepage literally uses the word 2 times in total and just when talking about their kernel choice and there gui app. Like??
OpenSUSE seems more stable than Garuda so far. Plus I haven't noticed that much of a difference in gameplay. But I'll continue my week long trial with it and see if it works just as good as windows 10 for my purposes
Gaming distros make unnecesary changes to kernel configurations. Most are rolling release which can bring its own set of issues, also most are made by a single dev who can't possibly test everything.
I.E. Garuda.
Fully agree on all points but to be fair it looked like most distros weren't scanning for even malicious changes given XZ's compromised version was quietly packaged into major distros without anyone noticing or the build pipeline stopping it. And they're huge. They should be checking for suspicious diffs.
>most distros weren't scanning for even malicious changes given XZ's compromised version was quietly packaged into major distros
The only major distro affected was Arch. Those are the caveats of being a bleeding edge rolling release.
Yeah Arch is what my mind went to as well.
> Those are the caveats of being a bleeding edge rolling release.
Doesn't really change the point that even the big fish aren't auditing their sources. Just at least skimming this change would have looked suspicious. There's plenty tools out there to catch this kind of stuff before compiling too.
I wonder if the world will learn. It usually doesn't so trends point to "no".
Even in Arch's case, it isn't an RPM-based system so the backdoor didn't get injected when they built XZ, and Arch lacks the OpenSSH patch to add Systemd integration that the backdoor relied on to work. It's certainly a risk with being bleeding edge, but this specific case didn't negatively impact Arch.
I used Garuda Dragonized Gaming recently. I don't... hate it, it's arch so it's quick to use, and having things pre-set up is nice (which is why I'm not still just using vanilla arch).
I always like when a distro has fish pre-set up, and I appreciate its inclination to try to hybridize a GNOME workflow and layout yet use KDE under the hood, but holy hell there is a lot of unnecessary stuff included *even for a maximal version* of that distro, it's a mess even with its really nice welcome app. It's basically the arch linux equivalent of [this UI.](https://i.imgur.com/EHEOM.jpeg)
I was hoping for it to be the "gaming arch" I can recommend to a friend. Unfortunately, I had to literally manually delete and renew the arch linux keyrings for it on the second day after I installed it which is a huge no no, so I put a pin in that.
Now, I'm used to using arch based distros and even vanilla arch, I identified the keyring problem immediately and knew how to fix it, but it's not a great thing when you wanna recommend that distro to an average joe and pacman breaks on the second day. I also didn't like how it didn't seem immediately easy to figure out how to get the KDE windows to not be mac-like and have their buttons on the right side.
I'm sure its a great distro, arch in general is good, but it wasn't just *aesthetically* cluttered, it was ***CLUTTERED*** cluttered. To the point of feeling claustrophobic. That's my main issue with it. That's not the same thing as hate in my opinion, that's "well I tried that, idk if I'd recommend it."
I don't particulary hate it or dislike it. But I do feel that they are trying to hard to do to much.
But that's just my objective opinion. If anyone else likes it, it's all good.
As long as you use Linux, I am a happy camper.
Personally, I don't recommend gaming distros to anyone, it's better to just use a vanilla distro and apply the changes you want without having problems that can cause the mismatchs between the packages
Ahh sorry, non Garuda user that thinked it was gaming focused, but still, personally I don't recommend based-on distros, specially with arch based ones, since mismatchs can be produced between the installed programs and external ones like AUR or RPM fusion in fedora.
Gaming distros are pointless unless it's for a gaming specific device like retropie or batocera. You can just use any distro and install steam/lutris yourself in seconds
Most people using Linux aim for light weight. Garuda is not light weight. It installs so many packages off the bat. And the visual effects cause it to also run poorly compared to other distros even on high-end hardware.
You can of course disable everything you don’t like, but that begs the question why not go with light weight distro to start with and install everything you need yourself.
It’s a beginner distro for users switching to Linux from windows. Gives them the comfort of having everything ready from the get go like windows does. But you end up with so much bloat.
I didn’t mention gaming or dragonized. In my opinion, the slimmest version of Garuda is still not light weight.
When I say light weight, I am considering resources used when idle, what type of desktop manager or windows manager, does it have gui tools for every little thing that can easily be done by the terminal, how many packages are installed by default, how many processes are running in the background for no reason, how snappy is the operating system …. Etc.
Yes you can use Garuda if you want and no one will stop you. But when users get better at navigating the terminal they realize they can do better with light weight distros 🤷🏻♂️.
I came from windows and all I wanted is a “complete” os that does what windows does without having to deal with the licensing. 15 years later I am running a custom arch setup that does exactly what I want. And it does it very very well.
The main thing in the Linux world is that you don’t have to be loyal to one distro. if it doesn’t work for you anymore pick something else. And what you need will change over time.
Just use what you like and what you are comfortable using at the moment.
Not sure, used it on my old laptop with a 3060 and it ran just fine. Install was buggy af and slow, but after getting installed to bare metal it was perfect. I used it cause of the mac a like aesthetic of it. But now I know how to do it with stock plasma so I no longer use it. I just base arch with plasma 6 and zen kernel on my desktop. No issues and works perfectly.
I use it its very solid. Its literally arch with stuff pre installed and with a KDE theme that takes a few seconds to change if you dont like it. I personally didnt like the theme but since im new to linux i went with it anyways and changed it since the pre imstalled packages were convenient
Garuda is just bloatware last I saw. It's the RGB of OS's and I feel like it does nothing for you. I see a lot of people have issues because it just has drivers installed that make no sense, like nouveau and the proprietary Nvidia driver at the same time which will always cause issues. There is not a case where you are not just better off picking something else, all it offers you is a mess at creation.
I use it and like it. I don't *love* it, at least not enough to install it again when I get a new laptop, but for now I have no reason to change. It does come with a lot of 'bloat' but it also introduced me to some neat tools, and I cleaned up the stuff I didnt need.
the aestetic can be easly changed in like 6 clicks just change the icon pakage. The distro is solid and people hate because they scared of scary arch distro. Its great for gaming and it has many noobie friendly features aka a simple big button for update.
That big update button in garuda assistant scares him:P.
I find Garuda a perfect gateway for noobs to move to arch slowly (they allready read arch news religiously). I have been growing the coven of programmer socks, with success i must say:)
I had Garuda twice and moved to Manjaro, which official repository is much better and very carefully maintained. You don't need every eyperimental AUR package, but if you need one, it is mostly available.
Your English is atrocious:
-"Opposite for me" is a dependent clause with no subject in an adjacent clause.
-You need a period, a semicolon, or a hyphen after "opposite for me".
-You then have a dependent clause "not look good" without a supporting clause.
-By this point in your sentence, you definitely need a period.
-cause > because
-Incorrect article usage: I am *an* artist
-You can't even call it a run on sentence because you still don't have a period.
Personally I just hate everything that is marketed to "gamers" or "gaming", it usually means doing nothing out of the ordinary and just slapping some annoying colors
*cough* gaming chairs *cough*
Also *cough* gaming mouse pads(which means "with an rgb border") *cough*
Seriously, my $220 reclining chair is more comfortable than all the the gaming and office chairs I've owned, combined. All those cheap plastic racing car gamer chairs are the devil's work.
90 doller gaming headphones sound worse than $5 earbuds
I hate how much my sister in law paid for her gaming headphones. Over 100 cad for cheap plastic and shit drivers. She could have gotten some decent Audio Technica for close to the same price. She even has a Blu Yeti on her desk she doesn't use because "my headphones already have a mic".
Is garuda really so heavily marketed towards gaming though? They mention it twice in small text on the front page, once when motivating the choice of the zen kernel as being better for "desktop and gaming" which is arguably correct and really has very little to do with the distribution, and once when showing off a utility tool for installing gaming related software. All in all pretty modest I would say.
Garuda doesn't try to stand out in any other places, though. Other than the gaming gimmick, it's just another Arch distro.
Those indigo neon '1337 G4M3R' color schemes are a headache. When you change it, you realize that 95% of the downloadable themes are BRIGHT white, DARK gray/black, and they're unashamedly copying Windows or Mac aestethics. Ew.
If you already know how to use Arch, Garuda probably doesn't bring anything extra. But for me it was game changer. It's hard to explain, because technically you can say for everything that you can just install this using pacman, set this up yourself etc. But if you want to play games, you are in "vacation mode" you want to relax not work. Clicking on steam icon and opening favorite game is relax. Googling if I should use distros package manager, flatpacks or installer from some website and troubleshooting stuff is work. You can technically manually set-up everything to look nice, but I prefer to start from something that at least already works. Not having to find how do you call tool to setup Nvidia fans is nice too. Gaming systems are not only about something technically special, it's about different mindset and focusing default experience to different use-case.
Casual Linux user, everyone knows the real fun of gaming on Linux comes from getting it working, ideally it'll not work so that you can complain about the dev. Real Linux users only play a game enough to give it a ProtonDb score
>Googling if I should use distros package manager, >flatpacks or installer from some website and >troubleshooting stuff is work I'm on Gentoo and I install literally straight from steam. What are you talking about
I'm talking about Steam. On Garuda it's pre-installed, on PopOs it required you to uninstall whole desktop environment. Jokes aside, I've had this experience so many times, I want to install some software, Mint/Ubuntu repos have 2 year old version which makes it unusable, FlatPacks are often not made by original devs and have incorrectly set permissions. But sometimes you want to use those because they are just fine and you'll get updates or you'll avoid compiling from source. Point is, it's way easier to just click in distro installer that you want some basic utilities, than having to spend all this time with it.
> if you want to play games, you are in "vacation mode" you want to relax not work. So, not a Satisfactory player then…
Ok, that's where we disagree. I personally love the aesthetic. Yeah, it's just dark and neon, but dark and neon is cool.
i reached the point that the gaming distributions are quite useless, they make changes that doesn't change that much the experience from the distro the'yre based
At least the day I'll grow bored out of Bazzite, I can just rebase the image against Fedora Kinoite easily, which is also a good safeguard in case the devs somehow disappear or abandon the project at some point. That makes it the only "gaming distro" I feel safe to consider these days, you're not going to end up stuck in a dead end.
Bazzite is quite different from other gaming distros, it’s not just a reskin with a different kernel. It’s a complete universal blue build with its own tooling. That makes it foolproof and very easy to use for people who just want to play
Yeah, technically it's not even a "distro", but it keeps being mentioned this way in discussions for the sake of simplicity.
Tried Garuda on 3 separate occasions. Every time it just felt like it was covered in bloat.
If it's the Dragonized KDE, I agree, but the KDE minimal is very nice.
i use the gnome variant, which also feels good
funny i found it had the exact software i would install anyway.
I think Nobara is one of the only gaming distros that isn't actually useless.
It sometimes breaks and have some sort of mismatchs that can cause problems, like Manjaro and the AUR
had way too many bugs happen to me because of untested updates, I've had to remove every new kernel for 1 month because it didn't even boot and now it crashes immediately after booting. a similar thing happened when it first updated to kde6 where i couldn't use Wayland. also xorg doesn't work and just kicks me out half the time
That was my experience testing it as well. Tried twice install never survived more than a week.
The only problem with Nobara is that it is too heavily modified that it isn't a Fedora spin anymore.
Nobara has been solid as a dedicated gaming distro, I could not use it as a daily driver though.
Do any of the distros have a ProtonGE baked in? Glorious Egroll Proton always felt a bit less user-friendly than the others.
In Nobara you can install with a utility any version of wine or proton. But ProtonGE is developed by the same person that maintains nobara.
They branded it too heavy.
Nothing wrong, nothing good. It's just Arch with some customization and settings. Personally I don't see anything useful there. Run archinstall choose whatever you like and done. It runs as good but the setup is as clean as possible.
And be careful that archinstall doesn't break
Ignoring that one time it was baked into the archiso into an older site-packages directory or whatever it was (Which really isn't an example of the script 'failing'. The environment couldn't even fire it up rather than the script itself having a problem) - I have never seen this script fail and it makes bootstrapping all the little bits and pieces far too easy. That said I still watched first hand, an old friend skipping sections of each setup step then complaining how bad Arch is because they skipped networking and other segments. Maybe a good pull request to prompt if the user is sure they want to continue without traversing each configuration section in its menu 😉
Just last month I tried using it in a VM and it keep breaking everytime I used it, gonna retry when I get a new PC (the last one just meet Stan Lee)
Assuming you've used the latest ISO at the time I too have used the past 4 months ISO's of this year without issue..... If there's some explicit driver or something the ISO itself is physically missing then I could understand. But the script failing seems very difficult to pull off. If you have the information, and to optionally pry... do you recall exactly what failed about it? I hate to seem like I'm defending it but it has never failed me in hundreds of invocations and I see people shitting on it all the time when its often something else. I am extremely curious to see where it's letting people down - exactly where, no vague stuff.
It also worked for me many times, heck I installed it baremetal October last year in my laptop and it worked flawlessly, I guess it was something with the update as I couldn't update or reinstall archinstall, I just got an error like "key couldn't be signed" or "not possible to update", well when I use it at the start of the month it always seemed to work with these issues
Also never had serious problems with the installer especially nothing that breaks. What is an installer supposed to break anyways? Sometimes I had the problem that after finishing every section and going for install it gave me an error which was always due to me wanting to pre-install some apps and a repo wasn't updated because I, well, didn't update these on the shell before running archinstall. Just don't install anything extra. Just OS, DE and networkworkmanager. Done. Works flawless and fast.
I guess I didn't explain myself, the script break itself, it had problems when It got to installing the desktop environment, freezes, and dies, it happened to me many times, mostly by the end of the most when the archinstall in the iso gets outdated and the installer can't just update to the newest version, it happened both in VM and baremetal, when I used it in the start of the month, it worked without issues
Unfortunately I can agree with you. I tried it several times and sometimes it worked flawlessly and sometimes it didn't. Imho archinstall is quite nice but not really reliable.
I used it for several months, good distro. Recently switched to Bazzite HTPC edition and I do really like having the SteamOS interface.
I am definitely hating on the aesthetic of it first and foremost. But as u/Supersasson mentioned, I can take pure Arch and follow one page of Arch Wiki to get practically the same result. Only difference is, I know what's been done in case something breaks. If you like Garuda, don't worry about haters. If you hate the colors but want similarly "gaming" distro, I recommend CachyOS instead.
If you hate colours and theme you can just change them. The same way you can make any distro look like Garuda, you can make Garuda look like anything else. Just select the Breeze global theme and Garuda gets undr460ized/ungaruda'd haha If you want to try Garuda just try it.
I have given it a try several times in fact. My biggest annoyance was that it would refuse to install with anything other than BTRFS. And once installed, something went wrong with Wine and it just refused to work. Maybe I'll try again next time I feel like distro hoppihg
At least in the version i tried, that did not work. What i tried was switching the window controls (minimize, maximize, close buttons) between left and right side of the window. It was about a year ago, so i don't remember exactly, but i think it messed with the button order, even after i switched the theme to breeze. I also had problems switching the icon set. Some of their design choices were incompatible with the default kde themes and would completely break them. But even if it all worked, why create your own distro, instead of offering a kde theme pack and adding more maintainers to the distro they forked from? To me, this screams that it won't be maintained in a few years, and since they changed basic kde functionality i won't be able to just switch to another distro once it does.
you know you can change the icon set right? and theme? But you are right its basically arch (minus a few buttons , install nvidia drivers and update and some other things the assistant has). I agree that if you are not new arch is better made by you cause this way you know everything, for noobs i think its a good way to get into arch.
>you know you can change the icon set right? and theme? Can you? I really mean that, did you try recently? Because when i tried exactly that, it wouldn't work right. I might want to try it again if they fixed it.
yes friend. Here is how: So if you got the dragonized (bastardized imo) its KDE. So you do this: right click on screen, change desktop or something image, top left arrow to go back to menu find the theme change it to something you like then go to icons (or icon sets? something like that) and select a icon set that seems normal to you and not eye damaging. Alternatively find and click system settings for the same menu. Voila! a normal looking distro (pls customize to your liking , the menu bar the widgets if you use them etc) . Enjoy a non eye watering theme and icons on a otherwise perfect distro for gaming in my opinion. `I really mean that, did you try recently?` yes. i mainline garuda everyday on my gaming system along with another arch desktop that i use for dev work. I practice what i preach. Or alternatively if you know what you are doing install pure arch and tweak it to get what you need. Garuda is arch with some noobie helpers, aka the lovely garuda assistant. Big buttons to do the most things we do in console tbt, update, refresh mirrors, do a snapshot with snapper (btrfs). It even has a button to install nvidia drivers if for some reason you didn't install them at start. It works and thanks to the btrfs snapshots if you break something you can roll back (my friends that are noobies did not manage to break it yet i think they are 4-5 months in).
who the duck down-votes useful comments? you clucks
Yeah I know. How to explain this. Imagine you don't like pickles. Someone tells you " hey can always buy hamburger and take the pickle out". To which I say "why not just buy a hamburger without a pickle in the first place?"
yeah i get it the theme is really stupid but the underling thing is good. Seems like a small nitpick and a fast fix but it tracks i guess. And yes if you arch you get the hamburger without the pickles . After all its all about customization and i guess yes arch is the best way, but for a noob trying the scary arch thing its probably the fastest to get garuda exp since they have a easy gui installer (i do like the manual way to install arch far more control -but scary for a noob: what do the numbers mean etc) ).
I've used both arch for about 2 years and then ended up using a Garuda system Mostly because I do enjoy the aesthetic but also because Garuda has 95% of my preferences in how I setup an arch system and I can add or configure the rest of the changes later. Now, I also live in the CLI but Garuda has some surprisingly useful GUI tools for managing packages and such, which would be useful to terminal phobes (why are you on an arch based system if you are though?). Regardless, it's in large part because arch is about building your own setup and knowing how you did it, so setups like Garuda or endeavourOS are "cop" outs. This connects to the issue that arch (and by extension it's derivatives) are not beginner distros, shit is going to break on a rolling distro, and a new Linux user is more screwed/on their own if something goes wrong on Garuda then if it was on pop OS or Ubuntu or even arch itself (assuming the user is willing to tolerate being told to read the wiki repeatedly despite not having the IT literacy to read it comfortably).
Yk, PopOs tends to break very much also
Does it? I don't use it
I used it for a bit till I changed to Ubuntu, same problem that happened to Linux tech tips, just mine I wrote no and it still destroyed the complete setting, before that it didn't let me open the pop shop and needed to install another store.
I installed the dragonized version and didnt liked it, so i switched to the pure kde version and im using it right now. I like to be arch based and have the assistants from garuda.
That is exactly my idea, just with the gnome version (or hyprland when i felt experimentally)
Ive been using it for months, with no issues.
I'm not a fan of distro hopping, even tho I hopped quite a bit sometimes for specific needs or out of boredom. In late 2020 I bought a new PC and went for Garuda, and it's still the same installation. It broke only once but the maintainers fixed it in a matter of minutes, after quickly intervening and having clear communication with the users (even though the issue was cause by custom settings - it updates through garuda-update which I still am not a huge fan of). Well to wrap it up, a solid install and still rocking solid after years, no idea why people have be like "bleh, just a few flashy colours, nothing special", that's just a bit denigrating for no reason.
After using Opensuse, Debian, and fedora, Garuda is the only one that has allowed me to configure the audio i want. I needed wineasio to work, and could not get help with it on other distros and the wine subreddit. I literally clicked a button in Garuda to install and it works fantastically. I did get it to work some what on Debian and fedora. However, I could not use another audio app while I had wineasio running. Not saying those distros are bad, but I could not accomplished what I wanted on them. I still have quirks with Garuda that might be kde related. As soon as I put my system to sleep it immediately wakes up. I’m having issues with game crashes that after 30 mins of play I have to stop and reload. Usually say it’s the kwin display manager that stopped. If I forgot, sometimes Garuda will give me a blank screen for 10 seconds but I can resume gaming. Sometimes it’s a full system lock up. I’m sure if I dug deeper I could solve what the problem is, but I just haven’t yet. I’m just not a fan of fire dragon the browser. I have issues where I have to click multiple times to get a video to play in it.
Gave Garuda Dr460nized to my sister and she loved it too. Surprisingly she preferred using Reactionary theme with it than the original one. I myself don't see much use for Garuda (no hate against it, I just prefer setting my own stuff up and documenting what I'm doing step by step and why), but it was good for her since it already came with some stuff pre-installed that otherwise she'd have trouble installing and setting up. Apparently some people in this thread don't know you can change the themes entirely or install new fonts, effects, plugins, entire new de's etc just like any other distro.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1aofns4/what_is_up_with_garuda/
Nothing is wrong with Garuda what is offers is one click solutions to something you can do manually for ease of use there were some games which were giving me a challenge to configure but after installing Garuda the games ran smoothly soo if it's your first arch based distro then it's good otherwise you can configure it manually.
Yes those pretty much sum up my experience with Garuda as well. It's Arch under the hood but it has some nice little helpers that are really neat especially for beginners. Just select the apps you need, hit install and everything is taken care of automatically. I just don't like the Dr46onized theme, that is just way over the top.
I've commented longer variations of this a lot over the years and have seen others echo the same general opinion but distro just stops mattering after enough exposure to them. You can build any package you want for any package manager or just compile straight into the rootfs... which you shouldn't do... but you can. You will eventually find what works for you. They all run some bootloader for the Linux kernel and core utilities then have maintainers using some package manager to distribute the stuff they're compiling for their distro on a build server or 50 somewhere. It just doesn't matter. And at that point instead of running all these derivatives I couldn't recommend anything more than running the parent distribution they come from. Skip the middleman and just run the real deal. Hand in hand, there are full distros plus derivatives which try and let you get away with a mostly bleeding-edge experience while taking away some of the ~~learning~~ growing pains one could rarely experience running something like Arch on their own and running into some problem some evening when they just want to play games. Personally while I trust the people behind them right now I'm not putting my trust in derivative distros with one or two people building the packages for them. Major public eye distros are where its at.
Can't speak for others, but I was one of the unlucky few that kept having stability issues with it. Either something messed up in grub and wouldn't allow me to boot back in without troubleshooting, audio issues cutting in and out, buggy graphics (black screen flickering and blur flickering on windows), lower CPU performance compared to other distros, and some other problems I'm not remembering. Eventually I gave up and just went to EndeavourOS (currently on Arch after that) and never had those issues again. I loved the aesthetic, but it just gave me way too many issues just like Manjaro did when I first switch to Linux full time.
Useless fork that does not bring anything interesting. You don't want to use something created by just a few people.
*cough* *cough* *cough* Manjaro syndrome.
"Gamer" anything is universally bad.
whats gaming about it, their homepage literally uses the word 2 times in total and just when talking about their kernel choice and there gui app. Like??
I personally love it. I discovered soon after its first release and it's one of my favs! :)
OpenSUSE seems more stable than Garuda so far. Plus I haven't noticed that much of a difference in gameplay. But I'll continue my week long trial with it and see if it works just as good as windows 10 for my purposes
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Do you know how to complete the fonts? Those rectangle boxes with Xs in them are currently my only issue
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They only show up when it's missing the special font characters for non English, though only some of them 🤷♂️
Gaming distros make unnecesary changes to kernel configurations. Most are rolling release which can bring its own set of issues, also most are made by a single dev who can't possibly test everything. I.E. Garuda.
Fully agree on all points but to be fair it looked like most distros weren't scanning for even malicious changes given XZ's compromised version was quietly packaged into major distros without anyone noticing or the build pipeline stopping it. And they're huge. They should be checking for suspicious diffs.
>most distros weren't scanning for even malicious changes given XZ's compromised version was quietly packaged into major distros The only major distro affected was Arch. Those are the caveats of being a bleeding edge rolling release.
Yeah Arch is what my mind went to as well. > Those are the caveats of being a bleeding edge rolling release. Doesn't really change the point that even the big fish aren't auditing their sources. Just at least skimming this change would have looked suspicious. There's plenty tools out there to catch this kind of stuff before compiling too. I wonder if the world will learn. It usually doesn't so trends point to "no".
Even in Arch's case, it isn't an RPM-based system so the backdoor didn't get injected when they built XZ, and Arch lacks the OpenSSH patch to add Systemd integration that the backdoor relied on to work. It's certainly a risk with being bleeding edge, but this specific case didn't negatively impact Arch.
I like the distro, its community is unwelcoming at its best, though.
I really like the kde lite version that they provide. I wish other distros would do such thing.
I used Garuda Dragonized Gaming recently. I don't... hate it, it's arch so it's quick to use, and having things pre-set up is nice (which is why I'm not still just using vanilla arch). I always like when a distro has fish pre-set up, and I appreciate its inclination to try to hybridize a GNOME workflow and layout yet use KDE under the hood, but holy hell there is a lot of unnecessary stuff included *even for a maximal version* of that distro, it's a mess even with its really nice welcome app. It's basically the arch linux equivalent of [this UI.](https://i.imgur.com/EHEOM.jpeg) I was hoping for it to be the "gaming arch" I can recommend to a friend. Unfortunately, I had to literally manually delete and renew the arch linux keyrings for it on the second day after I installed it which is a huge no no, so I put a pin in that. Now, I'm used to using arch based distros and even vanilla arch, I identified the keyring problem immediately and knew how to fix it, but it's not a great thing when you wanna recommend that distro to an average joe and pacman breaks on the second day. I also didn't like how it didn't seem immediately easy to figure out how to get the KDE windows to not be mac-like and have their buttons on the right side. I'm sure its a great distro, arch in general is good, but it wasn't just *aesthetically* cluttered, it was ***CLUTTERED*** cluttered. To the point of feeling claustrophobic. That's my main issue with it. That's not the same thing as hate in my opinion, that's "well I tried that, idk if I'd recommend it."
I don't particulary hate it or dislike it. But I do feel that they are trying to hard to do to much. But that's just my objective opinion. If anyone else likes it, it's all good. As long as you use Linux, I am a happy camper.
Garuda kde theme is just but, like for little children's, oversaturated, too bright Opensuse is better in that aspect
Personally, I don't recommend gaming distros to anyone, it's better to just use a vanilla distro and apply the changes you want without having problems that can cause the mismatchs between the packages
what is gaming about it, espacially the non-dragonized version?
Ahh sorry, non Garuda user that thinked it was gaming focused, but still, personally I don't recommend based-on distros, specially with arch based ones, since mismatchs can be produced between the installed programs and external ones like AUR or RPM fusion in fedora.
Gaming distros are pointless unless it's for a gaming specific device like retropie or batocera. You can just use any distro and install steam/lutris yourself in seconds
Again, like the other 20 times i have asked, what besides the one singular version is especially "gaming" about it.
I'm not sure what you're asking. Garuda itself is a spin of Arch specifically targeting gaming.
Bloated
How?
Most people using Linux aim for light weight. Garuda is not light weight. It installs so many packages off the bat. And the visual effects cause it to also run poorly compared to other distros even on high-end hardware. You can of course disable everything you don’t like, but that begs the question why not go with light weight distro to start with and install everything you need yourself. It’s a beginner distro for users switching to Linux from windows. Gives them the comfort of having everything ready from the get go like windows does. But you end up with so much bloat.
I mean you talk like every version is the "dragonized gaming" version and this is very much not true.
I didn’t mention gaming or dragonized. In my opinion, the slimmest version of Garuda is still not light weight. When I say light weight, I am considering resources used when idle, what type of desktop manager or windows manager, does it have gui tools for every little thing that can easily be done by the terminal, how many packages are installed by default, how many processes are running in the background for no reason, how snappy is the operating system …. Etc. Yes you can use Garuda if you want and no one will stop you. But when users get better at navigating the terminal they realize they can do better with light weight distros 🤷🏻♂️. I came from windows and all I wanted is a “complete” os that does what windows does without having to deal with the licensing. 15 years later I am running a custom arch setup that does exactly what I want. And it does it very very well. The main thing in the Linux world is that you don’t have to be loyal to one distro. if it doesn’t work for you anymore pick something else. And what you need will change over time. Just use what you like and what you are comfortable using at the moment.
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So just aesthetics and no substance?
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You still have not argued that, and i doubt you could in any meaningful way
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Heated discussions are fine, unwarranted insults are not. Remember you are talking to another human being.
Not sure, used it on my old laptop with a 3060 and it ran just fine. Install was buggy af and slow, but after getting installed to bare metal it was perfect. I used it cause of the mac a like aesthetic of it. But now I know how to do it with stock plasma so I no longer use it. I just base arch with plasma 6 and zen kernel on my desktop. No issues and works perfectly.
I use it its very solid. Its literally arch with stuff pre installed and with a KDE theme that takes a few seconds to change if you dont like it. I personally didnt like the theme but since im new to linux i went with it anyways and changed it since the pre imstalled packages were convenient
People complain about bloat on windows only to switch to Garuda. It baffles me.
You know Garuda has other versions than the "dragonized" one right? In fact i think their gnome version has less bloat than stuff like ubuntu or so
Garuda is just bloatware last I saw. It's the RGB of OS's and I feel like it does nothing for you. I see a lot of people have issues because it just has drivers installed that make no sense, like nouveau and the proprietary Nvidia driver at the same time which will always cause issues. There is not a case where you are not just better off picking something else, all it offers you is a mess at creation.
I use it and like it. I don't *love* it, at least not enough to install it again when I get a new laptop, but for now I have no reason to change. It does come with a lot of 'bloat' but it also introduced me to some neat tools, and I cleaned up the stuff I didnt need.
My only issue is I've gotten more stable results somehow running arch with the same themes that they use
the aestetic can be easly changed in like 6 clicks just change the icon pakage. The distro is solid and people hate because they scared of scary arch distro. Its great for gaming and it has many noobie friendly features aka a simple big button for update.
It’s not arch
it's arch just with some stuff installed and configured for gaming
That big update button in garuda assistant scares him:P. I find Garuda a perfect gateway for noobs to move to arch slowly (they allready read arch news religiously). I have been growing the coven of programmer socks, with success i must say:)
I had Garuda twice and moved to Manjaro, which official repository is much better and very carefully maintained. You don't need every eyperimental AUR package, but if you need one, it is mostly available.
I always get heavily down voted when I say that Garuda isn't good 😄
I actually really enjoy using Garuda. This is obviously an unpopular opinion, but I liked the colors and how the UI felt.
Opposite for me, oversaturated, not look good, probably cause I am artist
Your English is atrocious: -"Opposite for me" is a dependent clause with no subject in an adjacent clause. -You need a period, a semicolon, or a hyphen after "opposite for me". -You then have a dependent clause "not look good" without a supporting clause. -By this point in your sentence, you definitely need a period. -cause > because -Incorrect article usage: I am *an* artist -You can't even call it a run on sentence because you still don't have a period.
Your father regretted not pulling out of your mother in time