Garuda Linux (Arch Based - Performance Orientated)

[just2sweet]

Hi all. I've been using Arch for a long time, and recently have been distrohopping between various Arch based Linux distros. Most of them don't offer anything different to one another, other than Manjaro which has a lot of bloatware and is now a corporate company.
Anyway by far and large the most optimized and best performing one I've come across is Garuda Linux. It's a new distro, but it has performance tweaks out of the box (ZRAM/ZSwap, Performance CPU Governor as default) and other performance enhancements, and it was the only one that recognized all my drivers/hardware out of the box. It has a GUI installer for ease of installation. Even for gaming it performs great, especially compared to other distros.
If you're into Linux and especially Arch Linux I highly recommend you check it out The XFCE DE has performed very well for me but choose whichever DE suits you best.
Just thought I would share my experiences on here
If you try it out let me know what you think Do note I am in no way affiliated with it, but kinda wish I was. Loving this distro so much that I don't feel any need to distrohop now.

[Radium_Angel]

38 minutes ago, just2sweet said:

XFCE DE

This has been my experience under Ubuntu as well, Xfce for maximum gaming performance and responsiveness.

I gave Manjaro a swing under a VM but decided to stick with what I know, the .deb package management system.

I'm using Voyager Linux, which uses XFCE and some of the same performance tweaks out of the box.

[igormp]

42 minutes ago, just2sweet said:

If you're into Linux and especially Arch Linux I highly recommend you check it out

I get that you liked the distro and everything, but this really goes against all of the Arch principles. Shoving you some weird defaults while also making changes that would net a 5% perf increase for the sake of "gaming" sounds really sketchy to me to be honest.

 

I do have to admit that they only did minimal changes on top of Arch, unlike some forks such as Manjaro.

[just2sweet]

9 hours ago, igormp said:

I get that you liked the distro and everything, but this really goes against all of the Arch principles. Shoving you some weird defaults while also making changes that would net a 5% perf increase for the sake of "gaming" sounds really sketchy to me to be honest.

 

I do have to admit that they only did minimal changes on top of Arch, unlike some forks such as Manjaro.

Principles Sminciples. Just because of Arch has some unofficial made up principles, doesn't mean other distros shouldn't deviate a little bit and try and implement new things.
I've tried just about every Arch based distro there is/was over the years and 99% of them didn't offer anything different. They didn't stand out. To stand out you need to try something different and implement something new. Nothing sketchy about that or the distro.

[igormp]

7 hours ago, just2sweet said:

Just because of Arch has some unofficial made up principles

Except those are actually listed in the official page and wiki? I guess they're pretty official.

 

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doesn't mean other distros shouldn't deviate a little bit and try and implement new things.

Sure, I didn't say that they shouldn't. I'd be glad to see something like that.

 

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I've tried just about every Arch based distro there is/was over the years and 99% of them didn't offer anything different. They didn't stand out. To stand out you need to try something different and implement something new. Nothing sketchy about that or the distro.

And I don't see how this one does anything different? They just selected some already available stuff from the official repos (even the zen kernel you can install with a single command).

 

From what I see, even the Manjaro guys did more stuff "differently" and implemented new stuff on top of arch. This is just a pre packaged Arch with defaults chosen for you.

 

Wanna try something really different, but still linux? Try Oasis, Qubes OS or NixOS.

Something not linux? OpenWRT is really interesting for MMU-less systems. Plan9 was amazing concepts on networking and resource sharing. and Inferno takes this a step further.

There are many other interesting things that are not just selecting different defaults.

[just2sweet]

21 minutes ago, igormp said:

Except those are actually listed in the official page and wiki? I guess they're pretty official.

 

Sure, I didn't say that they shouldn't. I'd be glad to see something like that.

 

And I don't see how this one does anything different? They just selected some already available stuff from the official repos (even the zen kernel you can install with a single command).

 

From what I see, even the Manjaro guys did more stuff "differently" and implemented new stuff on top of arch. This is just a pre packaged Arch with defaults chosen for you.

 

Wanna try something really different, but still linux? Try Oasis, Qubes OS or NixOS.

Something not linux? OpenWRT is really interesting for MMU-less systems. Plan9 was amazing concepts on networking and resource sharing. and Inferno takes this a step further.

There are many other interesting things that are not just selecting different defaults.

Haha just because they're listed on the official page and wiki doesn't mean they need to be adhered to by every tom, dick and harry. Principles and rules were made to be broken.

 

Yes but more a lot of new users these defaults are 1. less time consuming 2. attractive to new users and especially new users to Arch and 3. it ensures that these defaults/configs work properly with the OS and no user configuration errors occurring.

 

No thanks, the whole point of this post was to recommend something I'm ALREADY happy with.

You have failed to see the point of this distro. It's not to divide Arch users, it's to provide a user-friendly interface for NEW Arch users and for previous Arch users who are sick of configuring a distro from scratch. You have wayyyy overthought this and brought it wayyy off topic.
And for the traditionalist Arch users who constantly bring up the Arch principles, that's just a cop out. With your theory, 99% of other Arch based distros other than Vanilla Arch itself have broken those principles because they provide some sort of "different" configuration by default. Don't think 99% of users actually give a damn about those principles. If they did Manjaro wouldn't of become so popular.

[igormp]

22 minutes ago, just2sweet said:

Haha just because they're listed on the official page and wiki doesn't mean they need to be adhered to by every tom, dick and harry. Principles and rules were made to be broken.

That sounds really... childish.

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Yes but more a lot of new users these defaults are 1. less time consuming 2. attractive to new users and especially new users to Arch and 3. it ensures that these defaults/configs work properly with the OS and no user configuration errors occurring.

 

No thanks, the whole point of this post was to recommend something I'm ALREADY happy with.

You have failed to see the point of this distro. It's not to divide Arch users, it's to provide a user-friendly interface for NEW Arch users and for previous Arch users who are sick of configuring a distro from scratch. You have wayyyy overthought this and brought it wayyy off topic.

I don't know if you have noticed, but the Arch community overall does NOT WANT such users in the community, since they'll miss on some basic stuff because it wasn't them who configured it. Manjaro posts on the Arch forum are instantly closed, as an example.

 

Such distros based on Arch can be considered their own thing that just make use of the Arch repos. The whole idea of arch is not imposing many defaults (if you can Live with SystemD, otherwise Gentoo is your best bet) and having the user choose their own stuff.

 

People who use those distros are NOT new arch users, since they have no idea what's going on underneath (heck, you can't even pick your own bootloader beforehand). And if some Arch user is sick of 10 minutes of configuration "from scratch", well, I'd first ask why are they reinstalling every time, and how they can be so lazy at the same time.

 

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it ensures that these defaults/configs work properly with the OS and no user configuration errors occurring.

One point that I want to bring is that this is just a shift of responsibility. Instead of the user itself KNOWING what probably caused some error, not they need to rely solely on the decision of the maintainers, and this has been proven time and time again to cause issues. Manjaro is a nice example where some maintainer did some mistake and users ended with broken things.

You're free to pick your poison, but I for one prefer to not rely so much on others and own my mistakes.

 

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With your theory, 99% of other Arch based distros other than Vanilla Arch itself have broken those principles because they provide some sort of "different" configuration by default. Don't think 99% of users actually give a damn about those principles. If they did Manjaro wouldn't of become so popular.

Yes, they do. No, those users don't care. Those users are also not really "Arch users", but Manjaro users. It gets to a point where the difference really lies in principles, otherwise Trisquel and Ubuntu would be the same, and the same goes for Parabola v Arch.

[Fatih19]

On 9/10/2020 at 7:39 PM, igormp said:

And I don't see how this one does anything different? They just selected some already available stuff from the official repos (even the zen kernel you can install with a single command).

Zen kernel? Is this some sort of kernel optimised for the zen architecture?

[igormp]

8 hours ago, Fatih19 said:

Zen kernel? Is this some sort of kernel optimised for the zen architecture?

No, it's a kernel with some different default settings, such as changes to the CPU scheduler. Makes it great for multi tasking, but performance for a single program is lower. You can read about it here.

 

Also it's weird to have Zen kernel chosen for "gaming", since performance is actually worse for this scenario.