Well… Garuda *nix is exactly the experiance that I try to avoid when it comes to an OS.
Saw a video on it, thought I would try it out.
First attempt
First, dropped the ISO onto my handy dandy Ventoy drive. Ventoy picked it up, boot started, all was well, then it just… hung.
Attempt 1.5
So… no Ventoy, cool, let’s flash the image (like Parrot!). I flash the ISO onto another drive, slap that bad boy into mai lappy top, no dice. WTF Garuda? Same issue, hangs at the same spot even.
Ok, I tried the “BlackArch” version, as I wanted to see what it came with, as the site advertises “2600 packages preinstalled” and… well more on that later.
Second Attempt, new ISO
Switched ISOs, thinking, "let me use the mainline, fully supported, KDE/Arch distro. Tried on Ventoy, which boots almost anything that I throw at it.
No dice. Tried the “free” drivers, still hangs on boot.
What the actual fuck Garuda. You have fancy screenshots, an amazing, modern website, but your distro is a pig to work with.
Third time, the charm.
Went back to the “BlackArch” ISO, cuz I really want both KDE and Arch to impress me. I want it so bad it hurts. Linux is known for it’s “fanboy” mentality with regards to Desktop Enviroments, and base Distributions, and both KDE and Arch are well known, with active development, and large communities behind them.
Apparently Garuda could not get those things working together. But I know my way around GRUB, I have gotten things to work more than I care to admit.
Finally, I get the damn ISO to boot. Nonfree drivers, flashed drive and about 10min of waiting. That’s right, I waited 10min for a modern Linux to boot on modern hardware. That is a bit of a turn-off right there. But, whatever. It was working.
Pros
After it booted, it detected my network hardware out of the box. The accessories that it came with were rather pretty, and this is one distro that has been made to look beautiful. There is an awesome two-line command prompt, numerous terminal emulators (why? but ok!) and color used in ways I am honestly not used to these days. Even the “wobbly windows” were a nice throwback to the days of my youth, hacking my way through some random Ubuntu spinoff. So… nostalgia points! Yay.
The website is beautiful. I mean, check it out.
Cons
It wasn’t blackarch. At all. There was a single included package (guymager) that comes with blackarch in the “forensics” folder of the menu. Not cool Garuda. Sure, I know my way around the package manager, and can install the things I need from the included repository. But I could do that from ANY distro.
KDE is buggy, or maybe it was Arch. There were graphical glitches, artifacts, and contrast issues all over the place. These are more likely to be config issues, rather than issues with upstream packages, but wow it was bad. Unuseable bad. Can’t read the menu… bad.
The aforementioned boot issues did not install a sense of polish, or confidence in me for using this distro for a project. I want an operating system that installs and then gets out of the way. Not one that I wrestle into submission, hack config files and then bugs out when I finally get it to boot.
Takeaway
Avoid this raging dumpster fire of a distro for anything beyond learning about how to NOT put a distro together.
