Well when I was testing out distros last year, I wanted updated KDE, Wayland, BTRFS, Snapper, full LUKS (including the boot partition) and I wanted it all somewhat complete and configured with a GUI installer. I had spent way too much time mucking around in the CLI with Fedora trying to get all of that and I was over it. Garuda just delivered. I didn’t know much about Arch at that time but man, it just works so well. All the issues I had with Debian and Mint and Ubuntu and Fedora, they just aren’t a problem with Arch. And Garuda has it all configured out of the box. I’m sure there’s some bloat in it - stuff that’s included that I don’t need. But I’m just happy everything I want is in there and I don’t need to figure it out
Interesting, I don’t use Linux on desktop (I’ve been using it on various Raspberry Pi SBCs since 2017 or so), but I am thinking whether to finally switch because Win11 sounds like a pain.
I was always under the impression that most Arch-derived distro were not really user friendly.
I feel that. Windows gives me the creeps since 8.1. Recently I setup a new Win11 machine and it took all day to get everything configured including figuring out how to turn off all the telemetry and spyware. I’ll use it for work but I don’t even like it on my network.
Arch from scratch sounds like an adventure. But there are many good arch spins like Garuda that make it easy, no drama.
I enjoy front-end configuration (Win11 doesn’t allow the taskbar on top, a non starter for me), for everything else around the OS/DE, I want zero adventures. I want it to be as boring as possible.
One other big issue for me is that it seems the last version of Office that works somewhat well via emulation (Codeweavers) is Microsoft Office 2013. This is ancient release and there are lot of must have features in later releases if use Word/Excel/Powerpoint in a professional capacity.
May be an unpopular opinion but I’m loving Garuda. I’m not a wizard and I needed something to just work with all the goodies. Garuda does it for me.
What do you like about Garuda?
Well when I was testing out distros last year, I wanted updated KDE, Wayland, BTRFS, Snapper, full LUKS (including the boot partition) and I wanted it all somewhat complete and configured with a GUI installer. I had spent way too much time mucking around in the CLI with Fedora trying to get all of that and I was over it. Garuda just delivered. I didn’t know much about Arch at that time but man, it just works so well. All the issues I had with Debian and Mint and Ubuntu and Fedora, they just aren’t a problem with Arch. And Garuda has it all configured out of the box. I’m sure there’s some bloat in it - stuff that’s included that I don’t need. But I’m just happy everything I want is in there and I don’t need to figure it out
Interesting, I don’t use Linux on desktop (I’ve been using it on various Raspberry Pi SBCs since 2017 or so), but I am thinking whether to finally switch because Win11 sounds like a pain.
I was always under the impression that most Arch-derived distro were not really user friendly.
I feel that. Windows gives me the creeps since 8.1. Recently I setup a new Win11 machine and it took all day to get everything configured including figuring out how to turn off all the telemetry and spyware. I’ll use it for work but I don’t even like it on my network.
Arch from scratch sounds like an adventure. But there are many good arch spins like Garuda that make it easy, no drama.
I enjoy front-end configuration (Win11 doesn’t allow the taskbar on top, a non starter for me), for everything else around the OS/DE, I want zero adventures. I want it to be as boring as possible.
One other big issue for me is that it seems the last version of Office that works somewhat well via emulation (Codeweavers) is Microsoft Office 2013. This is ancient release and there are lot of must have features in later releases if use Word/Excel/Powerpoint in a professional capacity.