The distro comes with an installer that asked me if I want to install Lutris, Steam, Heroic Games Launcher and the AMD drivers. Asked me about my browser preferences, including Vivaldi, which I actually use. It also took care of installing Wine and Proton GE for me, I just had to select them from a list.
It also includes a Garuda Toolbox application which is a general “I don’t understand Arch but need to do maintenance” kind of software. You hop in, drop tasks into a queue (things like checking for updates, clearing orphans, merging .pacnew, etc., etc.), and then it handles executing them all in the appropriate order after just a single root password prompt.
I still consider myself to be primarily a Windows user (I can actually properly troubleshoot stuff there), but I have dabbed in Linux many times over the years. I’m using Garuda for about a year now and I’m super happy with it.
As for other distros - I tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, Tuxedo OS (basically re-branded Kubuntu, specialised for Tuxedo Computers), Fedora, PopOS, and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting.
Garuda gave me the most “just works out of the box” experience to date.
Don’t get me wrong - there was still a bunch of things I had to do to get the experience I truly liked, but it gave me the fewest and the least annoying surprises so far.
As for things it lacks - if you get the “Dragonized” edition, you end up with a fairly heavy KDE, and some… questionable default theme choices. I’m running the Garuda Mokka, and I think it just looks super pretty out of the box. I disabled a couple of Window Decorations, but even out of the box it wasn’t anything super over the top. You can also always switch to one of the classic KDE themes, like Breeze.
This was my first foray into Arch, so I can’t tell you if it “breaks” anything someone experienced with Arch would be annoyed about.
User of Garuda Linux here.
The distro comes with an installer that asked me if I want to install Lutris, Steam, Heroic Games Launcher and the AMD drivers. Asked me about my browser preferences, including Vivaldi, which I actually use. It also took care of installing Wine and Proton GE for me, I just had to select them from a list.
It also includes a Garuda Toolbox application which is a general “I don’t understand Arch but need to do maintenance” kind of software. You hop in, drop tasks into a queue (things like checking for updates, clearing orphans, merging .pacnew, etc., etc.), and then it handles executing them all in the appropriate order after just a single root password prompt.
Sounds great! Do you have experience with other Distros and do you think this distro lacks in any area when it comes to use cases other than gaming?
I still consider myself to be primarily a Windows user (I can actually properly troubleshoot stuff there), but I have dabbed in Linux many times over the years. I’m using Garuda for about a year now and I’m super happy with it.
As for other distros - I tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, Tuxedo OS (basically re-branded Kubuntu, specialised for Tuxedo Computers), Fedora, PopOS, and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting.
Garuda gave me the most “just works out of the box” experience to date.
Don’t get me wrong - there was still a bunch of things I had to do to get the experience I truly liked, but it gave me the fewest and the least annoying surprises so far.
As for things it lacks - if you get the “Dragonized” edition, you end up with a fairly heavy KDE, and some… questionable default theme choices. I’m running the Garuda Mokka, and I think it just looks super pretty out of the box. I disabled a couple of Window Decorations, but even out of the box it wasn’t anything super over the top. You can also always switch to one of the classic KDE themes, like Breeze.
This was my first foray into Arch, so I can’t tell you if it “breaks” anything someone experienced with Arch would be annoyed about.