Garuda Linux - The Best "Just Works" Distro?

[@superslimanoniem4712]

- doesn't select office suite when installing - complains about not having any office suite Nice distro review though! Might test it out in my own vm.

[@connorazzarello5514]

Haven't watched the vid yet but I will note that the way they designed the scheduler (I think), it isn't designed to work well in a VM. I think they mention it on their site.

[@strider6294]

Garuda comes with gaudy window effects (on kde), tons of bloat and non free software. Dont waste your time.

[@hra4242]

@@strider6294 Buddy, if you use such a distro, its not about being efficient or complient to any licence. If you care for that use gentoo.

[@strider6294]

@@hra4242 Fair point. I'm no freetard, and I use debian myself. My problem with Garuda is that some of the nonfree software included in Garuda collects system usage information, which spooks me.

[@SpaceMarine113]

nice distro review, shitlord

[@dimitarkolev1704]

Mental Outlaw - "I don't care about eye candy" Also Mental Outlaw - "Man, I really dig the little wiggle when I move a window"

[@Marco-yk8kp]

14:54 "Maybe blender is here" kenny 7 seconds before: *hovers over blender* 14:47

[@IgnoreMyChan]

LOL! He totally missed it and then searches it on the next page again! 🤣

[@Marco-yk8kp]

@@IgnoreMyChan ye, i was rofling when he complained about blender not being there

[@RanEncounter]

Same with office suit...

[@ImSuchAZero]

Lol xD

[@ZenoDovahkiin]

"Garuda Linux Barebones is made for users who do not want extra software and functionalities and complain about bloat." I love the way this is formulated.

[@tralphstreet]

I think that people who complain about bloat in Garuda are just not Garuda's target audience.

[@lunakittyyy]

@@tralphstreet I think it's a community spin and they don't offer support for barebones

[@suyashbhawsar]

Then you love Arch Linux

[@supermasterfighter]

It’s still KDE though, it’s not starting you out in a tty, and honestly if you want that, you just want arch anyways

[@KnightMinson]

My problem is that it's still too much bloat

[@gamcd]

been running this distro for the past 2 months and It really is something. feels great, super customizable, at least somewhat minimal, really great

[@BlahBlah-cn5qe]

How is it somewhat minimal?

[@Momi_V]

@@BlahBlah-cn5qe Maybe minimal compared to some other mainstream distros like Ubuntu? Most of the customisations seem to be KDE settings and themes plus some custom scripts and "useful tools", while holding off on default applications and letting you choose if you need any of those game launchers, IDEs or media players... Though I would rather call it "nicely configured without too much bloat"

[@excitableboy7031]

Stop distro hopping. Pick a distro, strip it out, rebuild it as you like instead.

[@gamcd]

@@Momi_V what I meant by that

[@marius2k8]

I love it. I am running it off of a SanDisk nvme external hard drive over Thunderbolt. And I've gradually basically stopped using Windows over the past several months.

[@paprika5487]

There is always something frustrating about watching a KZbinr/streamer trying to find something when it is staring you in the face. I just want to jump through my computer screen and point it out hahaha

[@heisvi9317]

The Dora Effect

[@potejtomen7264]

The backseat gamer is in us all.

[@bogartwilley]

Hey paprika... Thanks for the nightmare fuel I mean nice profile picture lol

[@paprika5487]

@@bogartwilley Don't worry, I'll take it as a compliment xD

[@heisvi9317]

@not your cheese yes

[@vagraadam]

I've been using this distro with an i5 11400 with the integrated graphics and it definitely doesn't need the dedicated graphics, it's silky smooth.

[@Momi_V]

@Anunoriginaljoke The Garuda team explicitly points out you need somewhat decent hardware and they are really turning the animations, effects and eye candy up to eleven. So while it might not be special for it to run smooth compared to other distros, it's definitely reassuring for it to not need something like a dedicated graphics card just to run the desktop

[@arnorobinwerkman]

@@Momi_V i always turn eye candy to a minimum, but leave some like blur, transperancy, wobbly windows, etc, so the more effects, the better hardware you need

[@Roy_1]

@Anunoriginaljoke What kind of hardware do you have?

[@lord_khufu]

@Anunoriginaljoke i find 0 difference between turning off eyes candy effect off or on in windows, really just made everything looks worse while having minimal if at all impact, tested on a celeron n2840 2gb of ram laptop and a 5 years old hdd, it's like a few months ago, the laptop is now dead due to overheating, it's a good run i guess lol.

[@etopowertwon]

@Anunoriginaljoke depends on hardware. my hi end gaming laptoo has 360hz screen. most distro i tried render 60fps regardless. garuda supports it. I can tell difference in smoothness between garuda and manjaro. my desktoo has 60hz screen. ther would be no difference

[@World_Theory]

Maybe the problem of Blender not being where you expect it, is because Blender wears so many hats. It has a video editing hat, a 3D modeling hat, an animation hat (both 2D and 3D), a 2D drawing hat, a 3D texturing hat, and plenty more I've forgotten or didn't know about. Sometimes, I think it handles certain vector graphics tasks better than Inkscape. Certainly, with better performance and stability.

[@k8rgrl]

Blender took the emacs approach. "Wait this was supposed to be a text editor? Well it can brush your teeth too."

[@magnusm4]

I was super shocked when I saw Blender on a list of video editing software. Seriously?! It models, textures, rigs, animates, shades even 2D draws and now it's editing the entire video itself?! Next you'll see Blender on top lists of kernel distros for beginners.

[@minepro1206]

Guys they DO have an edition with no bloat, did you even scroll down the "Downloads" page?

[@notafbihoneypot8487]

They do

[@mariolis]

This eye-candy filled KDE is still lighter than vanilla Gnome let that sink in

[@florianfelix8295]

What I def find appealing is the support for custom kernels, performance tweaks, btrfs, pipewwire, all things that I would yet to explore yet by my own. The wayfire desktop option is also pretty cool. They dare to be opinionated and kinda avantgarde in a space that’s otherwise pretty repetitive.

[@florianfelix8295]

I would go for the lxqt kwin config though (and or wayfire) I would bet that also saves you some 300 gb ootg.

[@UNSCPILOT]

Been running Garuda Dragonized as my first serious daily use distro on my desktop for over a year now, baring some minor issues now and then that are easy to fix it's been pretty great, my games run good, I can get all the software I like or find equivalent, the utilities and updater it includes are useful, and I really haven't felt the need to try anything else so far, even installed Garuda XFCE on my laptop, still need some knowhow but it really does work pretty reliably for me

[@HaveYouTriedGuillotines]

_"They dare to be opinionated and kinda avantgarde in a space that’s otherwise pretty repetitive."_ Terry was unfortunately right. Most of Linux Land is a cult.

[@mehmehz8920]

The best thing for me honestly as a SysAd is having multiple VPN adapters preinstalled under network manager, it's the small stuff that makes Garuda amazing.

[@partha2806]

Wait how did you configure it?

[@dipanjanghosal1662]

So free vpn?

[@GreyGhost-r4z]

I was running Majaro and was tired of all the update issues. Downloaded this Garuda and I absolutely love it. The wallpaper changing app is fantastic.

[@5p4403]

Well Blender was there in the graphics software Also I am curious, how's your OpenBSD experience so far?

[@deathkeys1]

Me too, I mean, I'm rolling full blast on openBSD since late june this year, no windows, no linux, just openBSD and FVWM and so far I feel good.

[@Veri7a]

@@deathkeys1 what would you say are some things you like and dislike so far

[@deathkeys1]

​@@Veri7aTL;DR - I like that it is light, secure well kept(updates and patches are very frequent), rrctl and doas are way easier, the BSD way of setting up is easier. most applicationns I used in linux do work, libreoffice, firefox, vim, gimp, pcmanfm among many others..... I dislike the fact that it lacks in the hardware drivers department and the VM is very primitive(you can not get graphics on an OpenBSD VM) and not all applications I used in linux work here, like notepadqq and since I have a dislike for gvim, I end up using vim from the terminal. A well, let's start with the likes... please note, I am not using a Desktop Environment, I am using raw fvwm2, not dwm, nor cwm. thhe start was harsh... fvwm alone took me nearly a month and a half to get set up the way I like. the configs and all from openbsd were nice, I mean, doas and rcctl are easier than soystemd and sudo to get setup, though it took some getting used to since came from Windows and Arch Linux.... the system itself is very light, like super light, make most linux distros look bloated. I have a PC(core i3 3rd gen+4GB ram and 250GB HDD , I used Windows 8.1 on this one) the ram is old and defective, I can only use 2.4GB before things start going to hell and it becomes unusable(I know, I need a new one ASAP, but cash have been short lately), I also have a 2009 netbook an Hp mini, with intel atom n455 +2GB ram+128GB SSD and it runs just fine, but do not get any ideas, I open firefox there, and it just freezes... instead I use it for ssh, C and shell script programing. openBSD also comes out of the box with ksh, tmux, X11, andwith the best possible config(security wise) if you need a server, it is very easy to setup, and have very good support as well. Now... for the dislikes... I lacks in the driver support department... in my netbook for instance, I needed to buy an USB tp-link wifi adapter because it did not support broadcom, nor the ralink boards I had, and I tried. it comes from a philosophy of doing it right and the BSD way or not doing it at all... you can use ports but it is not considered that safe, unless you are 110% sure of what you are doing, ost programs you compile with GCC are not gonna compile with clang without some tweaks, the VM(virtual machine) is very primitive in fact if you need graphical interface or direct hardware access, for now just forget it, you re better off using some linux distro. some softwares from the repo(pkg_add) will be out of date and some linux programs will be straight out unavailable. but all things considered, I do Like the openBSD and the only reason I have to use Linux(when I make a new desktop) is the VM. and I will keep using the fvwm2 because once you get used to it, you won't go back, just set it up the way you like it and you will need nothing more... sorry for the long text, hope it helped. oh, before I forget, I do not know if that s your thing, but every release of OpenBSD does have art and songs with it. just throwing that out there...

[@Veri7a]

@@deathkeys1 Very cool man. I very much appreciate the deep dive into what you like and don't. That does help.👍

[@reckermatouvc]

@@deathkeys1 Hey there, William. The only computer I own is an old laptop, 4th gen i3, 3.4gb of working ram but since it's old I can't use over 3gb or else things go to hell too. Do you think that switching to Gentoo could help me get a better performance? I'm kind of a noob about linux, I use arch + kde/plasma as DE but the performance sometimes is not very desirable. You seem to know a lot about linux and free/openbsd stuff so maybe you could help me.

[@taxmachine5264]

i started to use Garuda for my daily OS and i switch from windows to this and its definitely a good replacement for Windows. My games work better (300 more fps than windows which i had 200 fps), its also a very good distro for reverse engineering, pacman and AURA repositories are filled with cool packages. i recommend it .

[@fatbeard8072]

I love the names of all Linux Distro's and I look them up to see any relevance on why the name or theme. So Garuda, also Galon or Nan Belu in Burmese and Karura in Japanese, is a legendary bird or bird-like creature in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain faith. He is variously the vehicle mount of the Hindu god Vishnu, a dharma-protector and Astasena in Buddhism, and the Yaksha of the Jain Tirthankara Shantinatha.

[@voidentente]

Installed it on my mum's laptop, she was thankful she no longer had to wait 2 minutes for windows to start up

[@pranav_ahuja]

Now your mother can tell her friends and relatives - "i use arch btw"

[@MenacingPerson]

dragonised or?

[@voidentente]

@@MenacingPerson The "minimalist" Garuda Linux-Barebones with KDE Plasma

[@MenacingPerson]

@@voidentente oooo nice choice! Does she know how to update it by herself?

[@trackno.1875]

If windows takes 2 minutes to load on her laptop then something was wrong with her windows install, windows may have it's faults but it's actually very fast booting nowadays, my pc loads windows 10 from a cool boot in less than 10 seconds.

[@jetfuel5140]

Been using Garuda for months now, it really is a great "just works" distro. Probably my fav easy to use arch distro ever since Antergos died.

[@egorandreevich7830]

but how about endeavourOS? It is the successor to Antergos

[@durschfalltv7505]

Are you still using it? Has been "Stable" so far?

[@nopenot-happening9074]

@@durschfalltv7505 I’ve been using it since January and it’s still rolling along fantastically! Never have had any problems that are worth remembering

[@whiskeylinux]

Wow this is a very nice distro all things considered. Gonna give it a spin in a few minutes, thanks! Great content as usual.

[@folksurvival]

Consoom content.

[@lapin_noir]

Knew those icons look familiar. Using the Sweet icon pack myself. This seems pretty solid, great defaults out of the box and pretty easy to set up. If I had another rig, I would try it out there.

[@bpittman1]

Thank you so much for covering this! I don't think I ever would have found this distro otherwise. From what I can tell it seems perfect for me. It's downloading now lol Edit: I have it installed and I've been using for a day and it's great :)

[@TheExileFox]

I asked a while back on their forum about issues running Garuda in a VM. they were semi-hostile to the idea and not helpful at all.

[@duser]

I was deciding between Garuda and raw Arch on my laptop. Tried Garuda and it wasn't that good imo. Most of the tweaks they used on KDE, you could set up yourself using the KDE themes (Sweet mars), desktop settings, and some Latte dock profiles. It was filled with stuff i considered bloat and i remember a lot of visual glitches (i think they heavily cut down on these now) and weird theme choices. However, that initial setup was so in depth and the Garuda Assistant is a great bit of software for quick changes of the more involved stuff. Defaults are solid too. They really did improve their distro massively. I'll still go with Manjaro if i wanted something that just werks. Only ended installing Arch because i am a noob that learns the hard way.

[@duser]

Need to append this. Garuda has a ton of software and options baked into it that i spent months finding naturally. For example, auto-cpufreq is a great tool you can use to change power profiles of your laptop without turning it off and on again. I just noticed you can enable it in the Garuda center with just a check box; it took me months to hear about this tool and i assumed power profiles on Linux weren't possible until then. This sort of stuff is invaluable for a lot of new linux users. For someone that wants to learn or already knows how and where to find these tools, Garuda may be not as useful

[@nikkehtine]

the theme they use is a generic "eye-candy" that gets annoying after using your computer for more than a week and the tweaks are just unnecessary

[@frozendeadbush5026]

Yep, ran into same problems. Also configuration with the terminal is sometimes not so easy because of their default one your gonna ran into errors...

[@alwinvillero9505]

@@nikkehtine I also see those shit in websites and it makes me want to bang my head on the desk

[@-rate6326]

@@nikkehtine its not like garuda only comes with kde

[@stu6949]

Well, I've just woke up today thinking about you uploading a video about Garuda Linux and you made it...

[@eightbit1975]

You hot the nail on the head about this being an "everything" type of OS. For me, I just needed something that would replace my Windows 10 install and I could continue the various things that I do (which are actually mostly NOT gaming), but have the ability to download my Steam collection and play those as well as my GoG purchases. I also play the odd emulator now and then, watch movie rips, play my music collection, view/maintain/organize my family photos...etc. An everything work and play computer is what it is. And this fits the bill perfectly with very little hassle. The only items I had to install for what I do were K3b (for burning stuff) and Gnome Disks for imaging flash media that I use for various vintage machines I build and collect. So yeah, Garuda is excellent. I am only using an old (third gen I think) Core i3 with the integrated video and 8GB of ram as well as a 240GB SSD....and it screams!

[@TheExileFox]

he does complain about "no mpv option" - yet there are several mpv frontends listed in the installer. All of them require mpv to be present. So that's not so great.

[@gavinthecrafter]

I'm considering moving to Linux once I get a new computer, and Garuda along with Pop OS are looking to be my top choices, cause they look clean, have user-friendly app stores with everything I need, and nice default themes that are a great change of pace coming from the dull-looking Windows 10.

[@gagne6928]

Pretty much every desktop environment can look good if you have a nice theme though. So I don't know if that's the best way to decide what distro to get

[@selfaware7617]

Best way to get attached to a distro is just to try it. Anyone who only has basic skills though will only use the options of customization available to them. That does depend on what you choose. My choice was clear when I decided I liked Debian more

[@gavinthecrafter]

@@gagne6928 Yeah but for a beginner like me I don't really know how to do stuff like that so I'd like a distro that looks nice out of the box

[@twistedgaming5893]

Ah Gavin, if you're still thinking about app stores I tell ya it's gon be rough for you

[@Banner1986]

Just awareness: It works great in a VM for me - I've isolated the cpus in the hypervisor and passed through a GPU and usb devices, gaming feels pretty great!

[@Momi_V]

At that point, would it not just be easier to multiboot it? The calamares installer even gives you the option to install alongside another os by shrinking or replacing another partition

[@Banner1986]

@@Momi_V mainly as multiboot only allows one system to run at a time, poor resource utilization/efficiency

[@seanld444]

@@Banner1986 by poor resource utilization, you mean statically-allocated storage space, right? Because multi-boot is gonna be the fastest way to run any OS, runtime-wise. Just clarifying.

[@Banner1986]

@@seanld444 sorry, I see what you mean, definitely leaves room for interpretation lol. I'm referring to efficiency not just storage, but all resources, compute, memory, and network). Beyond a certain amount of cores, at least for most use cases (gaming and emulation VMs in my case), theres a point of hugely diminishing returns (typically 6 these days for games, with a growing number exceptions where 8 is more standard). A single OS environment deployed for a given usecase (general home use, gaming machine, NVR, and so on) isnt going to be using 64GB of RAM, 16-32+ cores, 10 gigabits bandwidth, or hundreds of thousands if IOPS (for instance) the vast majority of the time unless its like a dedicated rendering rig (or similar) for a business that generates enough work for it. All that time not spent doing 'something' with those resources is essentially lost efficiency, and while 100% efficiency isnt realistic, you're more effectively able to utilize those resources by divvying them up so that, while you're still not using all your resources all time, more can be done with the same gear.

[@jetfuel5140]

@@seanld444 Multibooting gets really annoying after a while.

[@OverHaze]

Fish is absolutely essential for those of us with dyslexia. It doesn't matter how proficient I get with the terminal I will misspell commands and I will forget commands I already know. Fish is a lifesaver.

[@leonidas14775]

That's a gorgeous UI, I have to admit. I prefer minimalist distros so I have the most possible RAM and CPU cycles available to my programs. But this distro is a work of art.

[@reckermatouvc]

do you use gentoo?

[@leonidas14775]

@@reckermatouvc from what I've heard its very performant when set up correctly, but takes a lot of work to set up.

[@reckermatouvc]

@@leonidas14775 I heard the same things. I was thinking of trying it and when I saw you talk about cpu cycles i thought you were a gentoo user

[@joschafinger126]

C. 17:40 : I totally agree that POSIX compliance is more important than ease of use, and in fact that's the reason I still prefer bash to zsh: in bash it's easier, imo, to combine ease and compliance with risk reduction. A simple pointer in your .bashrc takes all of your aliases and custom functions, if you want to use them, into a separate file. In zsh that's harder to do -in fact, I ended up putting my custom aliases in my .zshrc in the end. That's an additional risk: screwing up your .bash_aliases or .bash_functions is easy to fix, or at least undo -even if it may mean that you may have to rewrite a function or two. If you want to simplify using the CLI, aliases are the way.

[@Zekr0_]

This is what linux should be about, CONVENIENCE!! I know linux in popularity is used via terminal but Garuda Linux here is a statement, spoonfeed and spoil the user with options, its really good that I don't even have to open app center to find and install most of the apps I use. I would hardly have to go out of my way to install 2-3 apps.....no wait! They even include IDEs 😅 and that is amazing how a distro is pampering me while others waste my time with troubleshooting stupidest things.

[@raven4k998]

yeah and if you have plenty of ram you don't need swap to slow the system down if you have enough ram to go without I love that part about garuda want swap here you go don't want fine no swap for you😊😊😊

[@szaszm_]

@@raven4k998 To be fair, swap can speed up the system compared to even slightly running close to max on RAM usage, and having the system grind to a halt. I have 128 GB, but still occasionally run into slowdowns due to too much stuff running. Adding +64G swap can often save me while building heavy apps on many threads.

[@raven4k998]

@@szaszm_ yeah but your just a weirdo that is to cheap to buy enough ram to avoid that problem in the first place by getting more ram there are system that can have 1 or 2 terabytes of system ram therefor if 128 gb is not enough 256 or 512 gb would be fine for your use case todays computers do offer solutions to those problems and ssd's do wear out plus the average user never has that problem plain and simple cause they just use there computer to watch porn and read emails

[@walter_lesaulnier]

The Garuda developers say specifically that performance in a VM is bad because of the special RAM handler and other tweaks. It is very fast and responsive on bare metal.

[@raven4k998]

yeah that is so true it runs like a boss when it's been installed on the system without a vm to mess things up shame it does not work with nvidia gpu's sadly😭😭

[@susch7466]

All these cool distros just won't fill the void my wife left. I keep downloading and compiling them from source do feel productive because that's what has once given me joy. When she left she took everything good in my life with her.

[@relt_]

are you comment etiquette

[@licentioushowler3400]

holy fuck lol

[@KarryKarryKarry]

Therapy has been known to work.

[@frozendeadbush5026]

Underrated

[@ZambonieDude]

I respect you for saying you’d buy an AMD card, if I had to recommend you, RDNA2 is great. Though if you already have a 20/30-series card I’d say wait for RDNA3, not that RDNA2 is bad. After a yr of being unable to buy GPUs from either company, you might as well hold out since in late 2022 they’ll be dropping the new cards.

[@danielbaker1248]

"The Windows are wiggly! 10/10! Would recommend!" ~ Mental Outlaw No, but seriously, thank you so much for this video! This distro looks like a major step-up for gaming and everything else I need! I love Mint, but this looks so much better!

[@ZenoDovahkiin]

I would like to point out that audio software recommendations include LMMS and Musescore, stuff that is definitely targeting creatives, not gamers. Also Blender wasn't under video editors because it is among the graphics apps; you skipped over that. I would have also complained about MPV, good thing, and this is why you watch the video before commenting.

[@turtleface6974]

”Just works” yes… wen you find the one desktop environment so nice. End up locking you out because wayfire isn’t compatible with nvida.. so you go through painstakingly and try the others with no liking… and end up installing arch the original way, that was my whole day… Love your content :D keep it up.

[@nikkehtine]

I never looked into Garuda much before simply because I don't like how it looks, but now I see that it's not just another GUI Arch installer but has good tweaks for desktop usage out-of-the-box, such as zen kernel, OOM prevention daemon, Btrfs with automatic snapshots, ChaoticAUR enabled. I installed vanilla Arch and applied these tweaks manually, but I think it's a good idea to recommend Garuda to someone semi-intermediate who would like to use Arch but doesn't want to waste time setting everything up and probably breaking something in the process.

[@ytiyktygtfg6970]

I currently run arch and I'm considering just switching over. Anything i dont like about it i can just pacman -Rs. If it were debian based or something sure but doing all the stuff manually just nets you the same os with a different neofetch logo.

[@MarwanMohamedMahboub]

What other tweaks u applied to arch ?

[@henrydong7653]

I feel like Manjaro has more support for arm and rpi’s but this is def the best for x86_64

[@mnemonix1315]

I tried Garuda ArcoLinux and Manjaro. Manjaro is def the best.

[@umamifan]

@@mnemonix1315 why?

[@ZambonieDude]

@@mnemonix1315 Yeah sure lol.

[@gtvwill]

Fuck yeah, garuda rocks. Deadset its actually an astoundingly good linux experience. Only problem I had with it was the heavily modified firefox distro had so much no-script/blocking implemented by default it made legitimate work sites not function. Only gripe with their whole rollout. Apart from that its freaking gorgeous.

[@hansdampf2284]

Just look at it :D But honestly, when it comes to arch based distros for me the only difference I care about is how their package policy is compared to vanilla arch. In other words: How far away are you from the bleeding edge? Everything else is just icons, gtk theme etc. optional stuff that I can easily setup myself. Same for the kernel. Doesn’t matter if their default kernel is Xen, I can compile that thing and run it on any distro

[@InfernalMonsoon]

That gaming laptop idea sounds great if you do end up shelling out for one. Would love to see more gaming stuff in general since there's a lot I still don't know about gaming on Linux :)

[@TheGuyWhoIsSitting]

For fun I decided to install the Xcfe version on an older laptop. I managed to build some software from source which is the first time I've ever done that as well. I don't think this is a bad beginner level distro. There's a lot of documentation for anything that isn't explicitly hand holding. Although, I don't know if I forgot to tick something or what, but cmake being absent initially confused me. I installed it with a little trouble at first, pacman was claiming all of the mirrors were returning 404's. Again, looking stuff up helped fix everything pretty quickly. I'll probably remove some of the software I don't have any intentions to use. I do appreciate that Garuda actually gives you advice when trying to partition the drive, even some of the other beginner distros I've used don't give any real good advice on that, for what potential problems you could face from doing it wrong. Even Garuda giving me a heads up was better than some other distros I've tried. One basically required me to partition and something went wrong and I ended up in grub rescue and couldn't find the files it couldn't find. I did research but basically everywhere I looked was like "just reinstall". Trying out Linux distros is fun. Makes me wish I'd started messing around with them sooner.

[@idkidc7513]

On the content department it's a 10/10 distro. Aesthetically... not so much. I hope that the devs provide a more suited interface

[@chaoticpanda6272]

They need to change that folder icons looks very childish.

[@shoofly6834]

Then get XFCE version.

[@Momi_V]

They have lots of different versions; Wayfire and Xfce look quite normal, and Mate seems also standard-ish

[@trneedaname4328]

There is a "dragonized" Edition, standard KDE. Or just barebones if you want

[@Voodoo_S3]

As a typically Debian user I was a bit wary of trying a Arch based distro but have been pleasantly surprised by Garuda (kde lite), have had literally no issues with it, as marketed it pretty much just works and it's fast, doesn't use/default to Wayland either which is nice (not a fan of Wayland).

[@bhavyakukkar]

people in the comments criticizing the look of it saying they would rather go minimal and configure it themself can't even get close to configuring as good as the garuda team did

[@amj.composer]

My thoughts exactly

[@lwoklidfr]

as a person who only installed linux because I have old laptop, having a good looking ui are preferable to me since I don't know how to customize it😂

[@captainet8315]

I used Garuda for half a year and the amount of stuff that shitted themself is astonishing.

[@-rate6326]

Maybe you would prefer garuda barebone

[@captainet8315]

@@-rate6326 Whats the point then? I'll just install arch myself.

[@-rate6326]

@@captainet8315 Garuda barebone is not that barebone

[@sonicjon9993]

Fish non posix compliancy is a non problem because you just put the '#!/bin/bash' on the top and then it's fine. Fish just includes a lot of features that are really nice. It's not like training wheels it's just more convenient and more user friendly and just easier in general.

[@JJSquirtle]

so training wheels?

[@JJSquirtle]

@@mikey4505 what? I simply said it's training wheels. Training wheels are not an inherently bad thing wtf? Try not to skew things towards your own narrative. I'd much rather someone take the time and learn the ropes of any programming one step at a time. So long as they take them off at some point, lest they end up like YanDev and his obsession with If statements.

[@sheis5358]

I recently installed this distro (w/ KDE) on a complete POS $140 laptop from Wallyworld, and after some tweaking (like boosting those dual cores to a blazing 1.2 GHz) it actually runs great! Everything is smooth, I've got multiple videos and streams playing while I type this, etc. Obviously the laptop is still a POS, but yes, you can absolutely install this on bad hardware and it will still sing.

[@patrickkaiser8793]

You should always have swap so memory reclamation is egalitarian. Otherwise, there's no disk backing for anonymous pages, so cached anonymous pages are stuck in RAM even if they could have been swapped out.

[@arthurbz]

Your channel is insanely good, thank you so much for having a lot of great content

[@orpheustakenvanced]

At the end of the day, most of these good looking distros don't offer anything more than some icon packs and themes. I wouldn't recommend any of them for a beginner.

[@guacfiend]

why not mr doe

[@Svaraijt]

Same

[@umamifan]

Right, all of these good looking distros are just cosmetic features and a few packages or plugins preinstalled. People should really stop falling for these random pop up distros... it will bite them in the foot eventually

[@elimgarak3597]

Garuda is really not just a theme pack. It has btrfs w/timeshift, the zen kernel, zram, etc. I wouldn't recommend it to a newbie tho, it really breaks a lot. I has to much packages and too much experimental stuff. I am fine on vanilla Arch and would just recommend Arco Linux to a newbie.

[@hedgeearthridge6807]

@@umamifan How on earth does a distro "bite you in the foot"? What kind of disastrous consequences are you thinking of? Every distro boils down to being either Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, or Arch. None of these distro's you're talking about are a completely new distro that could fail and lose support in a few years, which could actually cause consequences if you continue using a distro that has no support or reaches End-of-Life. You're being melodramatic about it

[@Humble_Merchant]

Arch based "Just Works" Pick one

[@minepro1206]

Indeed. Stuff breaks on rolling distros, let's face it. I've had to downgrade 3 packages recently because they broke stuff.

[@MrMangarillo]

i switched from windows to garuda after watching this video, ive been on garuda about 7 months now

[@jean-pierrea5803]

How good is your experience so far?

[@DarkVeghetta]

I'm glad you're doing these reviews - there are precious few channels that I'm familiar with that talk about Linux distro options. I'm one of those people that still use Win7 because of privacy concerns, bloat, and lack of opt-out features on newer Microsoft OS's. Sadly, I'm slowly reaching the point were I _might_ be persuaded to move on to a newer OS - perhaps as soon as this year. As I see it, my options come down to a heavily modified Win10 that guts the spyware out of it and allows for more control _or_ some sort of Linux distro. Given that I primarily use my PC to game and browse, in the event I do end up going with a Linux distro, it would have to offer some sort of VM tools that allow me to either emulate my current Win7 or possibly my old WinXP (which I used until ~5 years ago) for game-compatibility purposes - especially since I enjoy a lot of older games. The only experience I have with Linux is from about 20 years ago, when I had to night-watch a server over the summer that ran either Debian or Ubuntu with GNOME. Hopefully after watching a few of your distro reviews I'll be better informed in regards to my options, should I choose to veer away from the Microsoft reservation. Note: After a sleepless night I'm somewhat worried my syntax is a bit on the clumsy side, but I've already re-written this comment for over 45min; it's time I actually watch the video.

[@tostadorafuriosa69]

If you install linux hopping it will work like windows you are going to hate it

[@DarkVeghetta]

@@tostadorafuriosa69 Where did I say that I'm hoping Linux will work like Windows? I never said such a thing and certainly don't expect it. Furthermore, as I already stated, I'm mostly going to use my preexisting Win7 in a VM setup (necessary for many of my 250+ installed games - I doubt I'll be able to get all of them to run in Linux), but I do need Linux as a base to use new hardware and side-step the newer and far worse versions of Windows. Lastly, Mint and Manjaro exist and are the first distros I will be trying, specifically because they're similar to the UX that I'm familiar with. I'm not jumping into this blindly.

[@tostadorafuriosa69]

@@DarkVeghetta Given that I primarily use my PC to game and browse, in the event I do end up going with a Linux distro, it would have to offer some sort of VM tools that allow me to either emulate my current Win7 or possibly my old WinXP (which I used until ~5 years ago) for game-compatibility purposes - especially since I enjoy a lot of older games.

[@DarkVeghetta]

@@tostadorafuriosa69 I don't see how me stating that I need a Linux-based VM (which I found since then - QEMU) is me saying that I'm expecting Linux to function like Windows.

[@Andriej69]

Not gonna lie, this distro caught my interest and right now it's my #1 candidate to be my main OS on my (hopefully) upcoming upgrade. I've watched like five or six reviews and yours is the most competent by far, although that revisit in the current year would be extremely helpful, on laptop or not...

[@Nepoxification]

I am using Garuda for the past couple months and i can tell you that it didn't really change much from that review. The base principle is the exact same. Everything looks and feels the same as in this review. One cool thing they changed though, is they fully integrated BTRS and Snapper. That means they don't ship timeshift anymore. But the system makes fully automated snapshots whenever you install a package or boot the system and integrate those snapshots into GRUB. That means if something breaks, all you have to do is reboot, select the previous snapshot in your boot (they are even commented. like pre install steam and post install steam for example, so you know exactly what to pick) and as soon as you are booted in there it gives you a little window that asks if you want to restore from that snapshot. You can keep the window open in the background, test your system if everything works again and if yes, you click yes and reboot normally. If it doesnt work you click no and chose another snapshot. Super super handy and ridiculously easy to use if a system fck up happens. Other than that, it's exactly the same as you see here. The most important thing for me though, is the extremely active and nice forum they have. The community is super super nice, especially towards "beginners". Every question i asked was answered within a couple hours at max. Easy onces even within minutes. But don't confuse the forums with the subreddit. You don't ask any questions in the subreddit, and that sub is 100% dead :-D It's the forums that live. I will never use another distro tbh. I distrohopped for a year. Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, Vanilla Arch, Archcraft and finally Garuda...and i stuck with that because i am really really happy with it. It's the direct arch repos so you don't have to deal with broken dependencies like on manjaro and you basically have just arch inside... Very big recommendation from my side

[@Andriej69]

@@Nepoxification Wow, thanks for such an educated reply, once I finally upgrade to completely new rig, Garuda is going to be my main OS, might dual it with Windows 10 for a time, but I'll be saying goodbye to Microsoft sooner or later

[@dipanjanghosal1662]

@@Nepoxification thanks for your comment. Definitely gonna try it now

[@enhex]

7:50 both light text on light background & dark text on dark background design failures

[@robbzooi]

I'm really interested in garuda as I'm a huge linux noob, and I'm really happy that of all the youtubers, you made a video about it

[@crabbyboi9127]

i wish i new about this when i first switched to linux, this sounds like exactly what i need. Thanks for the review

[@liesdamnlies3372]

Even if I don’t use it, this has been a great way to learn about a bunch of software I didn’t know about. Thinking I may get a System76 laptop and slap the Blackarch version on it.

[@ZambonieDude]

You should, support Linux based laptops and right to repair my man.

[@liesdamnlies3372]

@@ZambonieDude Yeppers, those are my primary motivations for going with System76. To my amusement, I’ve caught shit from Mac users because “System76 is just as expensive.” Sure, they aren’t cheap. But I can repair it. And upgrade it. Myself. And the company actively supports that. XD

[@happyfeet4506]

This is the best out the the box distro I've used. It's lightweight it flys along lovely

[@chriseggroll]

it looks pretty, might give it a try at some point. i have a vanilla arch install currently but would try this just for the kde customizations

[@thetechguychannel]

While writing shell scripts, I tend to use the proper shebang on the top (#!bin/bash). I never had problems with fish as long as I followed those rules.

[@moninchow]

I've been running it for a year and I love it. I can't go back to anything else now.

[@frozendeadbush5026]

I think you should check out the barebones edition. I used the dragonised one for like a month but its all gonna get boring, specially the icon pack after some time and animations. Also, I have ran into some problems with configuration and even booting on bare metal. I'm not saying that its bloat, but it is hard to configure with the terminal because of many default configs that come with it, its just all gonna break.

[@theplaymakerno1]

What were the problems that you were facing?

[@sonofludd]

Garuda is pretty nice, fast and sleek (depending on your setup). I did however experience a lot of problems getting both wine and proton running on the xfce de, so I switched to GNOME (I heavily customized it with extensions) and everything seemed fine. Only gripe really to me with the post install procedure were some weird conflicts and dependency issues with pipewire-jack and jack2 which hindered a full system update without adding --ignore to these packages. Really frustrating, but I solved it after a while.

[@sonofludd]

Oh, and it's a really resource intensive distro, but GNOME might contribute to that. I have a fairly beefy machine, so no problem there, but I'd probably not install this on a weaker laptop, as mister outlaw points out.

[@AdroSlice]

Oh wow, they officially support sway. That's really cool. It's been my go-to TWM for a while now, glad to see it get some recognition.

[@kendawg_mcawesome]

Looks amazing, almost makes me wish I wasn't so Linux literate so I could experience this properly, but once you learn how to run a distro from the command line and config files, this kind of thing just feels too narrow and slow. Totally dope though.

[@tissuepaper9962]

fr fr. The whole "just works" thing isn't for me. My mind is always thinking "sure, it 'just works', but *how* does it work?"

[@CockatooDude]

@@tissuepaper9962 Bruh who cares, you click on the icons and they open stuff. If it breaks then you can care how it works so you can fix it.

[@beast4000]

Be wary of this distro especially on gamer laptops with dedicated graphics. When I tried it, it would only pick up the internal graphics on my Ryzen processor instead of the dedicated nvidia graphics card. Hopefully it’s gotten better about that since then. Made the switch to Pop_OS for the laptop and haven’t looked back. Pop also has options for starting your system with either the internal or dedicated graphics or hybrid modes that let you start certain apps with graphics card.

[@ZambonieDude]

Pop is still good for alot of people, this is possibly a Arch based alternative of someone wanted to give Arch a try.

[@Ryan-ct3rv]

You can use Optimus-Manager for switching between GPUs (it's what pop uses under the hood too). The program itself is operated through the command line but there are GUI widgets for most desktop environments so you can put it in your bar for easy access.

[@papiezguwniak]

American english best english. This is why I subbed. Make more cooking and Linux tutorials Kenny.

[@catcam]

Just subscribed ! Thanks for smart and funny content and all best from Croatia.

[@Peshyy]

Garuda is close, but not fully "just works". Yes, it's a beautiful distro and has great introductory software helpers. But specifically those helpers have many flaws. One of which - when you select software that is incompatible and pacman asks if it should remove one, if you select N, the whole script dies and all those 100 selected programs for installation never get installed, the welcome scripts are gone/hidden and that's that.

[@labspeciman7402]

Found out about this yesterday. Gonna check it out. Thanks!!

[@GreyDeathVaccine]

Wallpaper is amazing :-) I didn't know ClearURLs and DarkReader addons - thanks mate.

[@Kolor-kode]

Installed this a while back the first update borked the terminal. :D

[@liamsweeney4754]

just works distros somehow never seem to just work

[@robkam643400]

@@liamsweeney4754 Mint and Ubuntu are extremely stable.

[@zackinator1439]

@@robkam643400 We must define stable differently

[@008kevin]

@@liamsweeney4754 yea lol i tried to ise zorin os, bit it uas some crashing issues, and even if it didnt there are no linux drivers for my graphics card its pretty old (GT440)

[@robertlopez936]

@@robkam643400 so is my arch install

[@hanaito9982]

Hey, this maybe off-topic, but can you make a video about deleting "zombie" accounts? A sort of tutorial to delete most (if not all) online accounts that are not used anymore. That would really help a lot. Great video btw!

[@maximilliantimofte4797]

26:30 I am really impressed by this distro so far TOTALLY AGREE VERY STOCKED 28:20 actually stocked

[@martinMZ72]

I tried a lot of distros over the last three years. Garuda is my number 1. Everything works like it should, Dolphin can run with admin-privileges, it's fast and stable and its easy to get rid of the eyecandy in case it's to much for you.

[@josephmauck9200]

Blender was in the graphics section along with GIMP

[@bobdouglass8010]

I've been using KDE and Gnome desktop distros for over 10 years. But every time, there's UI issues (not fundamental issues, just UI) that end up driving me nuts and I go back to Windows or Mac OS. This is different, they've chosen everything exactly the way I would have but I never quite got everything working right. Latte used to always crash for me, here it doesn't. I love it, and I can't ever go back to Windows. Mac OS maybe...

[@expression3639]

9:30 Just because someone knows their way around a computer still doesn't mean they want to go through a lot of hassle setting it up. This is good for lazy people and people who just want to get things done, not only people who are new to Linux or to computers.

[@TechnoMinded-qp5in]

Garuda looks definitely better than Windows 10 and the wifi works better than when I use it on Linux Mint Cinnamon so instead I am using Garuda Cinnamon running off an LTS kernel and let me tell you I am not upgrading to Windows 11 due to privacy concerns going on with Recall being enabled by default in the next update.

[@robi1885]

I like Garuda gnome, I use pop shell with it to tile Super nice, Manjaro, pop!,mint and fedora we're not picking up the wifi card but Garuda did. Well done

[@TheOriginalEvanium]

Been using for a year now, love it.

[@HatTrex]

Thinking of using this as a secondary os, what are the best pros and cons + general garuda advice?

[@TheOriginalEvanium]

@@HatTrex it's the distro that launched me into Linux so I'm probably a bit biased. But like the video explains, very smooth and beautiful, if you have good hardware. I run on bare hardware 2080 super and i9 so it runs great for me, the only thing would be that my GPU runs at like 60 degrees idle but I can probably fix that by enabling the power save tweak in the settings. Plus any problems or updates to the distro you have, they have a really nice active forum.

[@HatTrex]

@@TheOriginalEvanium that gpu thingy is a pretty huge problem, prolly gonna skip the distro

[@TheOriginalEvanium]

@@HatTrex not a problem for me, and I haven't seen anyone else with that same problem either. But can't go wrong with any other good stable distro out there, there are a good amount to choose from.

[@shoofly6834]

Sounds like you might need to clean your graphics card.

[@chadchampion7985]

I dualbooted with the "dragonized" version because it broke in a vm. The desktop manager constantly broke in bare metal, idk why, searched their forum, couldnt find anything, removed it.

[@jetfuel5140]

Have had no issues personally and I've been using it for around 6 months.

[@khizaramin860]

While everything works out of the box, and distro is good looking, the memory management sucks. They claim that the ram becomes available as soon as any application needs it but that actually is not the case. I was running this on a laptop with 8 gigs of ram, which has always been plenty for linux. This is the only distro that complained about being out of ram with 2-3 applications open. moved to Arch with KDE and never had any problems since.

[@quarix4432]

I tried this distro because I saw your video. I'm fairly new to linux and not particularly tech savvy. It looks absolutely amazing, but when I tried to run any game (on steam proton and lutris) they all had major issues and were unplayable. So from a plebian perspective it's probably good if you don't try to do anything fancy and definetly impresses the egirls you run into. Also pacman is far superior to any other package manager - I could watch the loading animation for hours.

[@creeperkafasi]

16:42 "Remove orphans" Technoblade: Happy skywars player noises

[@trneedaname4328]

Ah, I see another Blood for the Blood god fan !

[@SIRCAM73]

This is my first Linux, installed yesterday fast and easy, and i have to say that was love at first sight, i like everything and stopped using Windows 11, for gaming i use Geforce Now running on Chrome Browser.

[@Jeff_Seely]

Thank you for the great showcase on this awesome Arch flavor. I think that calling it the best Arch Linux distro it is kind of like saying red is the best color of the rainbow. I think the best distro is the one you like the most. Well I like Garuda the most because it's managed to remain quick and snappy regardless that it has so much eye candy running. It is a Linux gamers wonderland of a distro so it has to be quick and snappy. And to me it has the best welcome utility. So yes I do like it best but that will not apply to everyone.

[@eddas5175]

For me it was Pop OS. Everything I need works out of the box, and steam games worked fine with Proton. I'm pretty happy with it :)

[@michaelofstjoseph]

Can you explain proton to a popOS newbie?

[@michaelofstjoseph]

@M T is it the same as wine? I installed wine but haven't tested a windows application yet

[@nuclearbomb9483]

@@michaelofstjoseph proton is a fork of wine integrated into steam

[@l4ndst4nder]

100% agree on the fish shell take. It would be easiest for new users to find script and config documentation for bash or zsh online.

[@liesdamnlies3372]

Fish is great for interactive use. Every other shell is just a pain to set-up.

[@uiopuiop3472]

NATO: Come here and use GNOME Me: I HATE GNOME. I HATE GNOME

[@comicsans1689]

Based

[@moister3727]

Ew

[@DanJimmy]

This is something I’d try on my rig

[@petermousses]

Last time I was this early she left...

[@beavatatlan]

i don't get it

[@tylerdean980]

Blackarch has open box I believe. I just use vanilla arch with DWM and add the blackarch repo

[@kimberlyjacobsen4148]

HDR screens brings the theme to life 😍

[@stevewimberley6065]

This is the best replacement OS I have found for my Mac Pro 3.1.

[@johnstancliff7328]

I downloaded it and installed it briefly on a AM2 based system, Works really nice and would replace W10 with no problem. this is one I'm keeping a copy of... that way I can install it on a recycled computer..

[@AcidiFy574]

Also, will you make a tutorial on Lutris?? I downloaded Deus Ex on GOG but there's only the windows version

[@eac-ox2ly]

Been using this distro for roughly four months. Finally decided to ditch Windows forever and started looking for an arch based "just works" distro, because I needed to get my PC ready for my job asap. Decided to go full autist and get a tiling window manager too. Ended up installing Garuda BSPWM and so far I have basically no complaints.a It really just works. Any problem that I had was from me trying to do some power user stuff or esoteric setups. So far only one update fucked up my system (and I update every two days at max), and even then, the BTRFS snapshots completly solved everything with one click. Truly amazing, shit really saved my ass. Only other problem was the compositor giving me shitty performance in games, but I solved that quickly by simply killing compton when gaming. In fact, my GTX 1050ti seems to not be able to run my 4K monitor + my 1080p monitor so well, so I ended up ditching compositing for good, as it made everything snappier.