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.
That's basically how a whole bunch of those "easy" and "gamer" distros are because people have no standards, they just want the "easy" part not the "runs well" part.
Manjaro is big and still we have no shortage of content for manjarno. In its earlier days Mint was also extremely sketchy, you couldn't even dist-upgrade it.
Those distros are for the most part just the regular base distro with a bunch of stuff bolted on that is not necessarily properly integrated. Some of them straight up copy the author's dotfiles into your home folder because their customizations depend on it and they didn't bother figuring out how to put it in /etc and /usr for a more system-wide experience. Not even using custom packages to automate it, just copied manually as postinstall scripts.
Making a proper, well integrated and reliable distro is art that few get right.
They're probably okay for most users, especially the gamer kind. But the value goes down fast especially when you're used to plain vanilla Arch.
Eh, IDK - the amount of breakage I got simply trying to upgrade the system after a few days would probably be incredibly hostile to a less technical user/gamer.
Sure, if most things worked out-of-the-box and upgrades were seamless, I'd agree - but as it stands, it seems like you need to know Arch and Linux itself fairly well to get the most out of Garuda Linux.
You missed the subtext here. Gamers will gladly accept broken ass things as long as there's a perceived way that it's easier and better, even when it's really not or leads to more convoluted troubleshooting.
See: every AAA big game releases lately. Even on Windows, having to nuke your graphics drivers and install a specific version from some random forum is generally accepted as fine like it's just how PC gaming is.
Never had to do that since I was ROM hacking an old RX480 for Monero hashrates. In fact, on my Windows 11 partition (Used for HDR gaming which isn't supported on Linux yet), I haven't needed to perform a reinstall of the NVIDIA driver even when converting from a QEMU image to a full-fat install.
When I see those threads, it often comes across as a bunch of gamers just guessing at a potential solution and often become "right" for the "wrong" reasons. Especially when the result is some convoluted combination of installs and uninstalls with "wiping directories and registry keys".
But, point taken, the lengths gamers will go to to get an extra 1-2 FPS even if it's unproven, dangerous, and dumb is almost legendary.