Other Arch Flavors I’ve tried (some are no longer with us) include:
- ArchBang
- EndeavourOS
- Manjaro
- Chakra
So with that out of the way, I’ve found my Garuda experience incredibly painful. From messy repositories (Chaotic-AUR plus their own stuff), to an overly involved upgrade process (when using the helper) - the distro screams of a team that has no freakin’ clue how to maintain an actual distribution.
It’s basically Arch on hard mode with so many settings rolled into their own packages which need to be removed before customization.
Then we get to the purported performance enhancements and, honestly, this is the worst performing distro I’ve ever used, by multiple miles. I’m not sure if its the scheduler settings, or something with the zram settings - but this distro hitches and hangs constantly. (5950x, 64GB of Ram, Samsung 980 Pro drives, NVIDIA RTX 3080Ti - NOT a weak machine by any standards)
I’d normally chalk it up to compositor issues on Wayland (yes, I prefer Wayland and it works fine for most Arch derivitaves even with Nvidia). However the performance issues even crop up on basic terminal commands on a TTY with lots of weird hangs and lags.
The ONLY thing that was easier on this distro was installing the various Proton GE builds and other specialty stuff found in the Chaotic-AUR. But given the above, it’s definitely not worth it when one can configure an Arch box to do the same things without all of the problems.
Perhaps I’m not doing something right? Given all the praise for this distro, perhaps it shouldn’t perform like this?
To be completely and utterly clear - I’m an advanced user trying out these distros for fun and discovery. I can indeed “just use a different distro” but wanted to give this one a fair shake before moving on.