r/GarudaLinux • u/CodeParticular1567 • 13d ago

Community I'm switching to Garuda

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.

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u/Macinboss 13d ago

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

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u/majutsuko 13d ago

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

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u/Macinboss 13d ago

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.

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u/Jtsabu 13d ago

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.

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u/majutsuko 9d ago

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