Other Arch Flavors I’ve tried (some are no longer with us) include:
- ArchBang
- EndeavourOS
- Manjaro
- Chakra
So with that out of the way, I’ve found my Garuda experience incredibly painful. From messy repositories (Chaotic-AUR plus their own stuff), to an overly involved upgrade process (when using the helper) - the distro screams of a team that has no freakin’ clue how to maintain an actual distribution.
It’s basically Arch on hard mode with so many settings rolled into their own packages which need to be removed before customization.
Then we get to the purported performance enhancements and, honestly, this is the worst performing distro I’ve ever used, by multiple miles. I’m not sure if its the scheduler settings, or something with the zram settings - but this distro hitches and hangs constantly. (5950x, 64GB of Ram, Samsung 980 Pro drives, NVIDIA RTX 3080Ti - NOT a weak machine by any standards)
I’d normally chalk it up to compositor issues on Wayland (yes, I prefer Wayland and it works fine for most Arch derivitaves even with Nvidia). However the performance issues even crop up on basic terminal commands on a TTY with lots of weird hangs and lags.
The ONLY thing that was easier on this distro was installing the various Proton GE builds and other specialty stuff found in the Chaotic-AUR. But given the above, it’s definitely not worth it when one can configure an Arch box to do the same things without all of the problems.
Perhaps I’m not doing something right? Given all the praise for this distro, perhaps it shouldn’t perform like this?
To be completely and utterly clear - I’m an advanced user trying out these distros for fun and discovery. I can indeed “just use a different distro” but wanted to give this one a fair shake before moving on.
the distro screams of a team that has no freakin’ clue how to maintain an actual distribution.
That’s basically how a whole bunch of those “easy” and “gamer” distros are because people have no standards, they just want the “easy” part not the “runs well” part.
Manjaro is big and still we have no shortage of content for manjarno. In its earlier days Mint was also extremely sketchy, you couldn’t even dist-upgrade it.
Those distros are for the most part just the regular base distro with a bunch of stuff bolted on that is not necessarily properly integrated. Some of them straight up copy the author’s dotfiles into your home folder because their customizations depend on it and they didn’t bother figuring out how to put it in /etc and /usr for a more system-wide experience. Not even using custom packages to automate it, just copied manually as postinstall scripts.
Making a proper, well integrated and reliable distro is art that few get right.
They’re probably okay for most users, especially the gamer kind. But the value goes down fast especially when you’re used to plain vanilla Arch.
They’re probably okay for most users, especially the gamer kind.
Eh, IDK - the amount of breakage I got simply trying to upgrade the system after a few days would probably be incredibly hostile to a less technical user/gamer.
Sure, if most things worked out-of-the-box and upgrades were seamless, I’d agree - but as it stands, it seems like you need to know Arch and Linux itself fairly well to get the most out of Garuda Linux.
You missed the subtext here. Gamers will gladly accept broken ass things as long as there’s a perceived way that it’s easier and better, even when it’s really not or leads to more convoluted troubleshooting.
See: every AAA big game releases lately. Even on Windows, having to nuke your graphics drivers and install a specific version from some random forum is generally accepted as fine like it’s just how PC gaming is.
See: every AAA big game releases lately. Even on Windows, having to nuke your graphics drivers and install a specific version from some random forum is generally accepted as fine like it’s just how PC gaming is.
Never had to do that since I was ROM hacking an old RX480 for Monero hashrates. In fact, on my Windows 11 partition (Used for HDR gaming which isn’t supported on Linux yet), I haven’t needed to perform a reinstall of the NVIDIA driver even when converting from a QEMU image to a full-fat install.
When I see those threads, it often comes across as a bunch of gamers just guessing at a potential solution and often become “right” for the “wrong” reasons. Especially when the result is some convoluted combination of installs and uninstalls with “wiping directories and registry keys”.
But, point taken, the lengths gamers will go to to get an extra 1-2 FPS even if it’s unproven, dangerous, and dumb is almost legendary.
I’m not as advanced a user as you so clearly are. But when I looked at Garuda they insisted you use btrfs and had no option for anything else. Well fuck that shit. I’m not touching that horror show of a file system again. Why does it have to be so opinionated to force one specific file system. Nonsense.
I have a hard time getting into a distro describing itself with a completely non-communicative “word” like “dragonized” but with numbers instead of letters. I thought it was cool when they provided a bunch of different desktops for live images (like wayfire), but they cut down on those.
Did you find Chakra to add anything to the Arch experience? I worry that it might be “like Arch, but maybe some non-Qt stuff won’t work.”
If you give CachyOS a try please report back! To me that’s the most interesting Arch-topper right now.
I use cachyos. I mainly treat it like an easy arch installer, it has calamares, allowing me to install LUKS encrypted BTRFS, with subvolumes that are compatible with timeshift without too much hassle, tinkering, or babying.
The first thing I do after installing is rip out many of the special changes cachyos makes. The theme makes some apps unreadable. Fish as a default shell is a really questionable choice (like I get zsh, but fish isn’t compatible with bash). I prefer bash so I switch back to that. The cpu limiter, ananicy-cpp, is generally annoying and I would rather not have it. I stopped using it when I was gaming (not anymore), and I realized that you have to manually add exceptions for games that weren’t in a default list consisting of mostly popular games, like the few games I used to play.
But the other performance changes are great. It has a custom repo compiled with x86_v3 extensions, which are proven to lead to a performance increase. Zram instead of zswap is a pretty powerful choice. The custom kernel (and linux-zen, which I use)* have an option enabled that enables the use of this software, called uksmd. A complex name, but it’s basically a ram deduper, and it’s very powerful. Right now, with only 9 firefox tabs and a terminal window open, I’m saving 350 mb of ram. With a LOT of browser tabs open, I’ve been able to save 1.5 GB before. Obviously, this comes at the cost of cpu, but I haven’t really noticed change to performance/battery life with it on.
Overall, it’s a very good, innovative distro (haven’t found uksmd anywhere else), with some questionable aesthetic decisions.
*the linux-zen is optimized for desktop use, linux-cachyos is optimized for gaming. I haven’t felt a difference, but right tool for the job I guess.
By any chance was this in a VM?
Nope - full fat install on hardware - as I said in the post.
Again, just so you don’t miss the crucially important context - I’m an advanced user. I typically run vanilla arch or endeavor, both of which do not have these issues. Not to mention, I know that many of these are a result of adding so many repositories on top of the base Arch ones - at least as upgrades are concerned.
If this was in a VM I would go to great lengths to specify as such.
