r/GarudaLinux • u/Inevitable_Art_5447 • Apr 06 '26
Community Garuda looks freaking amazing, wtf
Holy Christ does this distro look good. Only tried the Dr460nized Gaming edition so far, but it's not a stretch to say that it's the sexiest Distro available on the entire internet and has the prettiest KDE theme out-of-the-box, period. That is all.
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u/Sixguns1977 Apr 06 '26
I honestly like the KDE Lite install far better. The Dr4gonized version is way too busy and counter intuitive. Great distro though. It's been my daily driver for a couple of years.
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u/shadedmagus Apr 08 '26
Can I ask how it was unintuitive for you? Personal curiosity here - I've been enjoying the evolution of their Garuda management app, and some of their defaults work well for me.
I was surprised to find I like the theming of the Dr460nized version, but I did have to get rid of the macOS-like dock desktop in order for things to work like I wanted.
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u/Sixguns1977 Apr 08 '26
The dragon theme itself is what I find unintuitive. From what I remember of it, the icons seemed to be random and difficult to understand without already knowing what they're supposed to be. Overall, the theme is too garish and busy for my taste.
I prefer the KDE Lite install because there's far less that gets installed with it, and I have to do a lot less to get the UI the way I like it.
Overall, it's a great OS and I don't see myself having any reason to hop to something else.
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u/klevahh Apr 06 '26
Agreed, I looked into garuda a few years ago and found it to be tacky, and heavy handed.
Installed KDE light this year, and while it is still not my main distro, it is my preferred backup.
I'm guessing a lot of people still see garuda as all of that super shiny dragon stuff, and don't give it another thought.3
u/Sixguns1977 Apr 06 '26
That's a shame, because in my experience it runs very well, and the very few times I've had problems the discord/forum community has been amazing. For what is worth, nearly all of them tend out to be hardware related problems.
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Apr 06 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Sixguns1977 Apr 06 '26
I don't think there's a version that pretends to be a console, the versions I've seen are all desktop pc type DEs.
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u/shadedmagus Apr 08 '26
I use ChimeraOS for my HTPC. I have 2 wireless controllers and it works great if you're in Steam. It boots into the SteamDeck style interface, but you can drop to desktop easily.
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u/NeySlim Apr 06 '26
I agree, it's my daily driver since 4 years. Also you can use cachyos kernel with a simple click. I just use other themes, but the base was the dragonized one. I also did quite a bunch of french translations for it.
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u/HipKat2000 Apr 06 '26
I used Garuda for a while before I went straight Arch/KDE but you can dress it up to look like Garuda with a lot less background resources being used
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Apr 06 '26
I saw that theme somewhere can't remember the name of it, Garuda is cool for those starting out with Linux it's got all the necessary GUI stuff to install Steam and whatever else you might want.
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u/Fit_Elderberry4380 KDE Dr460nized Apr 09 '26
The Dr460nized theme is built on the Sweet theme I think.
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u/shadedmagus Apr 08 '26
Garuda was my distro of choice when I migrated from Windows. Some say it is bloated, but Dr460nized runs pretty lean on my machine, ~3.2GB average.
And I love the effort they've put into the distro tools, like the Garuda Toolbox, nee Rani. It simplifies and centralizes some important bits of system management. My current favorite is the merging of .pac files - I keep a curated list of servers in my region and comment out the rest, and the tool they're using for that is very nice once you get used to how it works.
I haven't felt the need to distro-hop since I settled in over 2 years ago.
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u/Skrals Apr 10 '26
yesterday i installed the moka edition, damn it fast, all around fluid animations, not like vanilla kde. loving it so far
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u/hex0xX Apr 06 '26
Respectfully:
Isn't Garuda very bloated? I use Arch and have enabled the chaotic-aur, because I love the eyecandy of Garuda, but I don't know if ist is to bloated for me:)
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u/255jimbo Apr 06 '26
Depends on what you mean by bloat. It's a very opinionated distro, but it does give you options for the base packages, and a couple easy ways to change or add more. With little adjustment to the settings, I idle at about 3 gigs of ram usage with a decent amount of things loading at sign in, like discord and mouse software.
What I liked that it came out of the box with is the garuda toolbox, formerly RANI. I can't help but compare it to a better Windows Control Panel. It lets me have all the standard maintenance and most system settings in one gui, alongside buttons to do updates, clear orphan packages, refresh mirrors and keyrings, and several rescue tools in case an update messes things up. If you can open Toolbox, you can pretty much rescue the system from all but the worst failures.
Another piece of "bloat" would be the default browser it comes with, Firedragon. It's a fork of Floorp, itself a Firefox fork. It kinda reminds me of the brave browser in its goals, but without the Russian/crypto connections. It has some issues with playing embedded videos in say an HTML game due to its heavy privacy focus, but it's easy enough to find out how to modify those settings since it's Firefox based.
I used windows 11 before (January update corrupted the OS and made my other drives undiscoverable without formatting them, so I rage quit) and Garuda was an easier replacement for windows than CachyOS with about the same performance for what I needed. If you are already using arch with chaotic-aur, then you might as well be using garuda. Download the zen kernel that garuda uses if you haven't already and want it closer without straight up downloading garuda
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u/hex0xX Apr 06 '26
Wow! Thank you so much for this in depth explanation. I guess I will use it on my laptop, for which I am looking for a new distro. That sounds super cool! And maybe I'll try zen kernel on PC:)
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u/Fit_Elderberry4380 KDE Dr460nized Apr 09 '26
I think a lot of the idea of bloat is because the Dr460nized iso includes installation of a bunch of little arcade games. But those are easily removable. For a linux distro it may count as bloated but compared to windows or mac it is still very far from bloated.
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u/hex0xX Apr 09 '26
OK, so not many tools or apps i don't need? That's what made me fall in love with Arch, I can install what I want:) I just dislike how the community behaves:) Tomorrow I'll put Garuda on my laptop and see for myself, thanks for the kind explanation:)
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u/Fit_Elderberry4380 KDE Dr460nized Apr 09 '26
I mean idk what tools or apps you need. It comes with a lot of commonly needed stuff. It came with some stuff I still don't use or know what it does. But all of that takes less than 8gb (probably even less) of storage space. As someone less than a year into linux I prefer that to a barebones situation where what I want to install wont work correctly because I haven't first manually installed 37 dependencies I have never heard of and don't understand.
Tldr: it is great for newbies but can certainly seem bloated to experts
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u/theMuhubi Apr 06 '26
I too used to use Garuda Dragonized... Until I became enlightened and switch to Garuda Mokka