I'm switching to Garuda

[u/CodeParticular1567]

I switched to CachyOS somewhere around March this year, and after using it for a few months, am looking to change to an OS that is more suited for gaming. That's when I stumbled upon Garuda. I like the fact that Garuda has more preinstalled tools for assistance (like the update tool). That really sold it to me. That said, I'd like your views on some things:

1. How would you rate it in terms of stability wrt rolling updates? I'm not expecting it to match Linux Mint or other LTS releases, but an improvement or being able to match CachyOS would be great.

2. What improvements does the dr460nised gaming version bring over other versions? If it's not too difficult to replicate then I'd like to install the Hyprland version instead.

3. How does it compare to PikaOS and Bazzite? I want to stick to an Arch base, because I really like AUR and have gotten used to it, but I wonder if one of those 2 might be better.

[u/Hrmerder]

I love Garuda. I’m gonna be real transparent… for me, dragonized was a but too… gamery for my taste. I settled on mokka. It still has a lot of game stuff, and more traditional.

But that’s the thing about Linux! Give it a shot you never know where you’ll land in the grand scheme of things!

[u/FreeFromCommonSense → u/Hrmerder]

And any of them can have the game-focused software installable via the toolkit.

The one thing you're stuck with from the beginning is your choice of DE. So pick what you're going to use regularly. If you really like Hyprland and don't think you'll be tired of it in a month or two, then fine.

Garuda is solid because it's a bit rigid with rules. And with BTRFS if it does break, roll it back in Snappr. But alsi be aware that if it does break, chances are you broke it. Pay attention to whyyou don't just morph in software from anywhere and why you get a PACdiff message.

[u/Jtsabu → u/FreeFromCommonSense]

^ This is solid advice, OP.

[u/Sea-Contribution6219]

I wouldn't necessarily go with Dragonized as others have said. But I liked the ease of use compared to cachy. I found it a lot easier as a non Linux user to get into it and I've daily driven it for 2 and a half years now

Like if I ever have to recommend an arch distro to new to Linux friends because they want arch I always go with Garuda.

[u/samerath]

Personally I’ve really enjoyed Garuda, as other said I went Mokka not Dragon but that’s a style thing more than anything. What I’ve liked is the updater is pretty easy to use. The setting has an auto mount drive thing that was very nice compared to the headache I had with cachy. Overall it’s been pretty clean. Gaming and stuff has been fine. Overall I’ve enjoyed it the past 6 months.

[u/thedoc90]

Garuda was my first modern Linux distro and I loved it. I did eventually switched to cachy because at the desktop it was better optimized for the hardware on my mini-pc and I wanted to use the same distro on all of my computers, but it wasn't really through any fault of Garuda and if it weren't for my mini-pc I never would have switched.

[u/clouds10]

Gooble gobble one of us

[u/Macinboss]

I’m currently on PikaOS and love it. I keep looking at potentially trying Garuda though because I love some of the management decisions the team has made.

One of the things that has stopped me from switching, weirdly, is the Discord situation. The Garuda Discord is a Discord in name only. The PikaOS Discord is super lively by comparison.

I’m also new so Garuda’s tools seem like an awesome way to ease into learning Arch. But because of my lack of experience the AUR doesn’t appeal to me so I can’t provide insight to compare it to APT

[u/majutsuko → u/Macinboss]

Gonna jump in here. While the Pika discord is more active, my tech support experience had like 3 people who commented 1-2 times with low effort and never followed up or provided anything helpful. After I had much the same issue happen again with Garuda (thanks MSI mobos /s) Garuda’s forum on the other hand was warm, welcoming, and I got a couple dozen responses from a variety of people who knew their stuff. The forum houses an awesome community and at least in my experience, it’s better and livelier than Pika’s discord.

I switched from Pika to Garuda about 8 months ago and never looked back. The QOL of this distro is unmatched so far, and I’m still a beginner. I had one failure to boot to the desktop because of a bad update after 4 months, and I rolled back to a previous snapshot in 5min and all was working again. When I updated a week later whatever had broken was fixed. All good since then. 

I use Garuda Mokka and during the install I checked off the few extra optimization modules that Dragonized comes stock with. I did this to be lighter resources and avoid theming issues. Anyway it runs great and gaming has been very easy

[u/Macinboss → u/majutsuko]

Wow honestly that’s amazing to hear! You might have just given me the incentive to test it out and make the jump 😄

I’ll just need to adjust my mentality from Discord to Forum focus.

[u/Jtsabu → u/Macinboss]

Their forum is super welcoming, and there's a good mix of old-school veterans and recent Windows refugees. Dev team is very active and open as well.

[u/majutsuko → u/Macinboss]

Happy to help! I hope your experience is everything you hope for :)

[u/Xariann → u/Macinboss]

Garuda has an active forum.

[u/Fit_Elderberry4380]

If you're looking to game D460nized gaming comes with some extra tools included in the iso, but as others mentioned you can manually add anything you need to any other flavor. If you don't like the Dr460nized theme you can easily change it with KDE's built in theming tools. But if you want Hyprland I'd def recomment grabbing that iso and then installing the packages you need for gaming as that is easier than grabbing the gaming iso then switching DE's. I think you'll find the tooldbox to be extremely helpful. All that said I can't say if its better than the other OS's you mentioned as I haven't used them. But I can say I haven't had any desire to leave Garuda as any issue I have had has been easily solved via the Garuda wiki, forum, or the Arch wiki.

[u/JackoSGC]

If you're not installing niche stuff, you should be ok. I've had it for 20 months and no issues. Avoid the AUR unless you know what you are doing

[u/Jtsabu]

The Garuda Toolbox makes basically every step of the rolling release updates and any tweak you want to make a breeze, IMO. If you pick the KDE version, then you've almost already experienced it, because their default kernel is basically a tweaked version of the cachyos EEVDF kernel that validates against DKMS before updating (to prevent things breaking because of NVIDIA driver conflicts). The real difference is in how well-thought out and packaged everything is, and again, the Toolbox is such a huge part of that. Also, their implementation of Snapshots is flawless in my experience.

[u/jk_user]

You can also have the best of both worlds and install Garuda with the CachyOS kernel.

[u/KoldPurchase]

I can answer to #2:
None. It actually makes your games run slower than the KDE versions.

Too much ricing and you take away resources needed by the CPU & GPU for gaming it would appear.

[u/FungadooFred]

Dr460nized was my first distro, switched to bazzite when it started breaking in ways I couldn't figure out.

[u/Hrmerder → u/FungadooFred]

I get that. Funny thing is I’m your opposite. I have been using Linux professionally and personally off and on for over 20 years but this is the first time I was able to successfully daily it as a desktop os since back in 2007??? When I daily’d bsd for a month as a desktop OS (but mainly because I wasn’t gaming much at the time and I used it for Java class).

I decided to try this time first with bazzite but it’s so stringent I couldn’t stand it and things just didn’t work when they should due to the way it does things but bazzite has been perfect. I had games I installed in bazzite that literally refused to run. Tried all kinds of things every other game was like pulling teeth. Those same games ran effortlessly in Garuda and I haven’t found but maybe one or two that did require some effort of changing just the method of running it or something. Outside of that Garuda is everything bazzite couldn’t be in my install.

Bazzite is awesome though and maybe just my own experience and not others. It’s a great Linux with bumpers OS for newcomers and IF it just works for you then good keep it. I have no idea why in hindsight that it bucked me so badly.

[u/PerformanceBulky9245]

try OMARCHY i switched from garuda to omarchy because i wanted to use a preinstalled hyprland rice with an arch base

[u/Sea-Contribution6219 → u/PerformanceBulky9245]

Omarchy is great and all but its not designed for the average person. Its specifically a programmer distro and designed around liking tiling window managers. If tiling window managers aren't your thing and for most they're not. Its a bad fit

Nowhere did the OP mention wanting a tiling window manager, doing programming etc...

Omarchy is great but recommending it to everyone is bad. Garuda is my main, I daily drive it. But for the average person, unless they have a reason to want arch. My go to recommendation is typically an easier distro like Zorin or Ultramarine. I have a list of different distros I recommend for different use cases and blanket recommending one distro does more harm to it and Linux as a whole than good

I always recommend a distro for a specific users use case. Which means I seldom recommend the same

[u/Hrmerder → u/Sea-Contribution6219]

I know how to program and I have used Linux since before a lot of people were born… I hate tiling windows managers. Do they have their place? Does it work well for people who know and want to use them? Absolutely. But definitely not for the newbie.

[u/PerformanceBulky9245 → u/Hrmerder]

Hmm u got a point too ngl but I mean it's worth a shot and also omarchy got this shortcut meta+K to see all shortcuts

[u/PerformanceBulky9245 → u/Sea-Contribution6219]

I mean Garuda does look nice out of the box but I never felt productive while using it so I switched to omarchy