My Review of Garuda Linux part 1 of 2

[mhbell]

Like I said in a previous post about Garuda Linux. Wow! What a difference from a couple of years ago.  Both the Cinnamon DE version and the KDE Plasma version are Fast, slick, and lots of features as well as eye candy. I installed both of them to a SSD using GPT partitioning with a EFI, Boot, Swap, and Home for each of them. I am using the Garuda Grub to Boot my Primary Mint on another SSD and both of the Garuda Distro’s on this SSD. I'll start with the latest version with the KDE Plasma DE. It booted fairly fast. During the installation it uses the BTRFS as default instead of letting you use EXT4. I could find no place to change it to EXT4 so went ahead and installed it using BTRFS. (see the note below). The install did not take long at all and It booted right up to a welcome screen. The first thing it wanted to do was update the system. It took me a while to figure out how to do it. One of the things I did not like was the dark desktop and the hard for me to see very light print with my old eyes. (I'll change that as soon as I figure out how). The update was slow and a little confusing for me at first. I kept getting a message saying (failed because of a conflict with network manager). I finally figured out how to delete one of the files causing the conflict. After that the update went smoothly although very slow.

 

Next was to install Thunderbird and Variety Wall paper changer. It was a simple matter to copy them off of one of my SSD's and put them in Garuda's home directory and then install new ones with Pacman or Octopy thereby keeping all of my email and wallpaper settings. It appears that Garuda by default uses a Browser called DragonFire that looks like and may be Firefox, but it works different and I could not get it to sync my Bookmarks and settings, So I downloaded firefox and google-chrome. I sync-ed both of them and everything is working fine. On all of the menus the buttons are on the left instead of on the right. I am sure that can be changed. When I went to do a update using pacman a box jumped up and said use (Garuda update) instead. I used (pacman -Syu). I've only played with it for a few hours, but like what I've seen so far. I need to learn more about it as I've not used KDE For several years. Stay tuned for Part 2 and also my install of the Cinnamon version.

NOTE:

If you Preinstall The partitions using EXT 4 then use edit each partition without formating you can use EXT4 instead of BRTFS. I was able to change the buttons on the windsows to the right side by changing the theme to Breeze.

Mel

 

 

[mhbell]

I've been playing around with both the KDE Plasma and the Cinnamon versions of Garuda and I've managed to get my brother laser printer working. I learned a new command. Garuda uses "paru" instead of yay, and that is how I installed the printer package. it was a very interesting experiance to watch it download and build the package. so far I like both DE's, but Cinnamon will always be my favorite for ease of use and to get work done. KDE Plasma is fun to play with and has lots of eye candy, but is harder for me to get things done. Maybe after using it awhile I'll like it better. I also found out that garudas Firedragon browser is actually a modified version of firefox. so I managed to sync it and google chrome to get all of my settings and bookmarks. Installing apps and packages with the command line is a snap as long as you know the name of the package that you want to install. I am learning something new everyday playing with these Arch derivatives.

Mel

[raymac46]

I certainly enjoy working with Arch or one of its derivatives like Endeavour OS. Since I am normally running my Arch installs on older, RAM-challenged hardware I generally stick to a lightweight DE like Xfce or LXQt. As you are finding out it is fun to play around with an Arch based system although it isn't always as straightforward to configure as something like Linux Mint.