I’ve been gaming on Kubuntu for over 2 years now but recently have been getting interested in Garuda. I’ve booted into the live Dragonized Gaming iso and was really impressed with the out of the box gaming-centric setup.
I’ve also been looking for more reasons to switch away from Ubuntu, and have been hit with the EOL countdown for plasma in 23.04, so the time is right for a distro hop. With the latest Garuda release they added an official Hyprland variant which looks really cool too.
Does anyone use Garuda? What are your impressions/thoughts/experiences? What should I expect from switching to an Arch base? Same questions for Hyprland too.
I have 16 gigs of ram, an Intel i7 something and an nVidia 2080.
Edit: I booted into the Hyprland live iso last night and I must say, Hyprland is cool af. Really a breath of fresh air and very intuitive. I’m going to run with the install this weekend.
I have Garuda and love it. Big things to note: my monitors and it don’t get along great, updates are frequent and can be weird, and learn to use the chaotic aur
Garuda is easily my favorite arch based distro, nice to see ppl talking about it! Once you get used to using yay instead of apt-get and the AUR in general it’s such a better experience
How does yay work? Is the workout similar to apt? Update, upgrade, and install commands?
To search the AUR and add a program:
yay (desired package) You’ll see multiple choices most likely, pick one and it’s pretty self-explanatory from there.
To remove program: yay -R (program)
system update/update all packages: yay -Syu
There are a few different package management tools too like Octopi which let you directly browse the AUR by category in a GUI but I think that’s pm the basics.
What do the -Syu arguments mean? I associate them with the Arch meme of “go ahead and break my system without prompting me first.”
S is for sync, which installs packages from the repositories. u is for upgrade, which upgrades out-of-date packages. y causes pacman to refresh the package databases. In short, it upgrades all packages that are out of date. It’s a very standard command and not dangerous lol. Btw, with yay just typing in “yay” without -Syu does the same thing, which is convenient
Thank you!
Cool! Thanks for the reply!
With regards to Arch based distros: Do you still need to read Arch news to spot potentially breaking updates and know how to diff pacsave/pacnew, etc. or have Garuda found a way to manage these things?
It’s probably wise to check the forums regularly, I had to reinstall the entire OS once (arguably because of NVIDIA) but on more than one occasion it’s stopped a update for me because packages were in conflict. So it’s nice that there’s some foresight on their part.
I can’t speak for Garuda, but if its Arch based I’d imagine it’d be pretty smooth. Gaming on Arch was like a few button clicks to enable proton in my laptop and thats it. I think theres a steam package on the AUR, idk if Garuda can use arch user repository I’ve never looked at it. I’d say go for it, especially if you backup your current setup.
I’m currently using Garuda! I love the arch features (rolling release, AUR, etc) and love the game integration tools: 1 click to install nvidia drivers, wine w/winetricks, retroarch, and a bunch more.
However sometimes I observe some kind of stuttering during games. I have a 3070Ti and that kind of stuff shouldn’t be happening on 5+ year old games.
I would still recommend it as a lot more people seems to be running it without issues, but idk, I guess no system is perfect.
It’s great! You can expect updates that don’t take literal years, but you will need to maintain your system a bit more (Garuda provides utilities to make it easier).
What are some examples of the additional maintenance you’ve had to do?
Simple stuff like managing some dependency issues (like when packages get renamed), actually knowing how to use the command line (you don’t need to learn awk, grep, and sed just yet), and knowing how your bootloader wants to be treated.
You’ll get it as time passes, but Garuda assists in most of these things.
Thanks!
Garuda was the first Linux distro I was using as a daily driver. To me it was working nice out of the box with a Nvidia GPU and It was beginner friendly to me. I have since switched to Arch now, but yeah. Give it a go
I used it for a while on my laptop and I like that it comes with the BTFRS snapshots by default. I used the KDE Lite version I think it’s called.
