A First Look At Garuda Linux KDE "Dr4Gonized"

here in the last few weeks i've been getting a lot of requests to review a linux distribution that i had never heard of and that linux distribution is called garuda linux garuda that's an interesting name it kind of sounds like a cheese but i'm not going to hold the name against this distribution people keep telling me that it might be the best archbase linux distribution out there right now so that is a tall claim and i want to try it out so i'm going to download one of their isos and take a look at garuda linux for the very first time in a virtual machine so i'm going to go over to the gruda linux website and their website is garuda linux.org and reading the blurb on the main page we can choose our desktop environment and our selections include kde gnome xfce cinnamon mate lxcute deepen wayfire bspwm and i3wm so i will choose one of these let me go to the download page and it says please read it says our editions are optimized for performance on real hardware installing on virtual machines is not recommended as it might result in a bad experience i get that but i'm just taking a quick first look at this thing so doing it in a vm will be just fine i'm not doing any kind of performance benchmarking or anything like that obviously it would be unfair to do something like that inside a vm rather than on you know bare metal but today i'm just going to take a quick look at one of their additions inside of vm now the requirements look quite hefty now typically when i review these distros in a vm typically i give it two cores of my cpu four gigs of ram and 25 gigs of storage space well it says requirements recommended 40 gigs of storage space that's a huge amount of storage space just to install a linux distribution that's crazy high and they also recommend eight gigs of ram i get that on a normal machine in a vm i'm just going to give it four gigs of ram i'm sure it'll be fine and they have minimum requirements though these are the recommended requirements 40 gigs of storage space eight gigs around the minimum requirements there are only 30 gigs of storage space and four gigs of ram and then we need to remember that our username and password for the live environment is going to be garuda for the username garuda for the password i like that they include that information on the download page because i would have had struggled with that and they not told me that now do i want the kde plasma edition i like kde plasma and since it's the very first thing on the page it's probably their flagship desktop environment so i might pick that we have their kde ultimate gaming edition now that's going to be a really large iso and it's going to require a ton of storage space and i'm not going to be doing any gaming so i'll skip that they do have a light edition and their light edition for kde is 2.5 gigs in size that's still not a light iso as still a hefty iso 2.5 gigs the one right under it is also a kde edition garuda kde dragonized and look at the way they spelled dragonized and you got dr46 owned you know that is a very hacker way to spell dragonite the person that made this iso is a legit hacker i mean they would not have spilled dragon eyes with that 46 in the middle of it if they weren't like if they didn't have some serious elite hacker skills so that's going to be the one i download i think let me go ahead and grab that i'm going to torrent it all right so i created this vm i gave it four gigs of ram 25 gigs of storage space i think that's going to be plenty for this thing just to you know take a look at it and the boot menu really looks like manjaro's boot menu it's got those the same kind of options if you guys have ever booted into a manjaro live environment and i'm just going to go ahead and boot directly into garuda kde dragonized it may take a minute or two to finally boot into the live environment this is the same as booting directly off of a live usb stick you know sometimes the getting into it will take a minute or two and i did have to change the video driver in the vm to get it to load up it was actually going to hang on that black screen there so i went and changed the driver to vert i o so those of you using verb manager it looks like if you change to vert i o you will get the splash screen here at the beginning where before it looked like it was struggling to load up a x environment and it was just you know a black screen so all right and let me get rid of that message there and we have this welcome screen here the gerudo welcome and let's see if control alt t would bring up a terminal do they have that key binded it looks like they do all right man this terminal looks good i look kind of like that blur effect they've got going on that's console with a k that's kde's console and wow look at this shell prompt here is this the fish shell uh does uh neo fetch tell me what the default shell yeah user ben fish three point one point two so already this kde dragonized version of garuda is impressing me because they are using fish as the default user shell this is something i told you guys i wanted to see in my own operating system like if i ever created dt's os it would use the fish shell so already i'm pretty impressed with this this here i'm going to run a quick x render just to get a better screen resolution here i want to see you know what my options are 1920 1920x1080 is an option so all right now that i've got that set let's go ahead and run through the installation now where is the garuda installer do they have it down here somewhere maybe in the dock where it's easy to get to it doesn't oh it's right here on the desktop so let me close the welcome and click on the installer and this should launch the calamari's installer i will say that the live environment already without even really playing with anything the live environment looks gorgeous gorgeous wallpaper gorgeous icons that that terminal with that weird uh blur effect going on just looked just amazing all right so the installer we have the welcome here we need to choose a language by default it's set to american english which is fine for me so i'm going to click next then i need to choose my time zone they have chosen the eastern time zone in the u.s i'm in the central time zone so i'm going to choose chicago here in this list and then the keyboard english us is chosen that's correct for me and then we have our choice whether to do the automatic partitioning or the manual partitioning i'm going to do the automatic partitioning and it's going to create a 25 gig butter disc file system here very cool letter fs as the default file system i kind of like that too what's your name i'm going to call my user dt what is the name of this computer i'm going to say geruda vm and then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the dt user and then repeat that strong and complicated password and then do we want to log in automatically without being asked for a password no the reason you create a strong and complicated password is you know for privacy reasons you want to have to enter a password to get into your computer now do we want to use the same password for the administrator account so this is your sudo password do we want the dt password to be the same as the sudo password yeah that's fine that way i don't have to remember two different strong and complicated passwords then i'm going to click next and here's the summary location looks good keyboard looks good the partition scheme looks good i'm going to click install it says the gruda installer is about to make changes to your disk in order to install garuda rolling you will not be able to undo these changes so this is a warning if you were doing this on physical hardware it's about to format that drive and start writing to that disk and any information on that disk of course would be lost here in the vm though there's no dangers and then the installer is going to run typically this portion of the installer will take you know about 10 minutes typically so i'm going to pause the recording and i'll be back once the installation has completed and the installation has completed that just really took five to ten minutes or so now in the calamares installer to complete installation what you need to do is click restart now and then click done and it will reboot the vm in my case or you guys doing this on physical hardware you know it'll reboot your actual computer and you need to unplug the usb stick sometime during the reboot so let me go ahead and all right we got to a grub menu so the installation looks like it went well let me go ahead and load up kde the dragonized version of kde all right we got to our login manager let me enter my password and we wait for kde to boot up and we have booted into our kde plasma dragonized desktop and i've got to say this may be just initial first impressions the best looking linux desktop i've ever seen like everything just looks good that wallpaper the colors the blur effect going on and some of the applications i like the dock at the bottom with these really cool icons these very stylized icons the menu system here inside kde plasma that's got some blurring going on it's just really really just a very clean and polished look probably the best linux desktop i've ever seen as far as just aesthetics the only one that i think maybe comes a little close is the deepened desktop environment you know some of the deepen releases here especially here recently look very good as well and we do have this welcome screen here i'm not sure if i want to go through a lot of this a lot of this is just information about garuda such as web information i'm not going to click on any of that and you have contact information you have a link to their git lab their telegram group their twitter and we have some web services that we could enable things like bit warden and private bin some cloud stuff circs for a search engine i'm just going to go ahead and close out the welcome let's start with the dock at the bottom i'm assuming this is probably latte dock which is often used with kde plasma and we have links to the welcome program so we could launch it again if we needed to we also have our terminal which is alacrity now in the live environment it was console with a k console with a k is also here so we have two different terminal emulators in the dock that's interesting i use alacrity these days i really like the alacrity terminal because i just know all the key combinations and the key bindings and everything and it just looks good and we have the fish shell inside alacrity we have some nice transparency inside alacrity but of course console with a k being a kde application has that really cool blur effect going on it has that gaussian blur effect you know where the alacrity uh transparency really doesn't have a blur it's just transparency but console you know actually has a blurring effect and that's probably one of the advantages if you were going to use this of just using the kde applications is because some of the latest versions of plasma now have this really cool gaussian blur effect you know and same thing in the menu system you know well you can't really tell because the wallpaper in that area where the menu is is a solid color but if it was different colors like out here you can tell you know you've got that same kind of gaussian blur going on now i'm just going to quickly go through the menu system just to see what is installed by default now this was kind of a light edition they don't call it light well actually they do looking back at their web page they did call this kde dragonized light and the iso was 2.0 gigs in size so still a big iso so there's some programs installed but it shouldn't be that heavily bloated under the development category we really don't have much here some cute stuff which you know most people are not going to be interested in playing with graphics the only thing here is ocular which is the image viewer that's uh that's interesting so it actually is a light edition because i would have expected more stuff to be in that category same thing with internet there's really not much here uh some avahi server stuff the kde connect and of course firefox is our web browser let's open up firefox and let's see what version of firefox we are on i'm actually not sure about this particular release how old this iso was i didn't get a date on it looks like firefox opens up just some different web pages by default that's kind of weird dark reader help i don't know what dark reader is or why this is loading up in my firefox that's kind of strange we also have another tab here and this is welcome to localcdn okay let me go to the help information help about firefox and this is firefox 82.0.3 so that's a pretty recent version of firefox on my arco linux installation on my main production machine firefox is already on version 83 so it's just slightly behind but again i don't know how old this iso is i actually opened up console here and if i did a pseudo pac-man dash capital s lowercase y lowercase u let's see how many updates are available if i decided to take an update here and this may take a second to sync all the repositories one of the repositories is called chaotic dash aur so that is interesting it says replace k docker with chaotic aur slash k docker dash yet sure why not not sure what k docker is i'm not a kde guy so i don't really know that much about the kde plasma desktop but it doesn't look like it was a terribly big update if i chose this update it's really just a few things that needed to be updated 71 packages which were a rolling release distribution you know this looks like it's pretty up to date i'm going to decline the update for now and let me close out console with a k i do like the global menu and the window decorations that are integrated i don't know if you guys noticed that when you go full screen with an application you have the global menu a very mac like global menu and then the window button controls are also integrated into the panel at the top i really really like that that's a nice touch let me open up console with the k one more time and let me zoom in if i can let me do a u name space dash r and the kernel we are using is 5.9.9 zen this is the zen kernel which is really geared toward uh better performance you guys especially if you were going to use this as like a gaming machine or something like that you know that's typically when i see people installing things like the zen kernel i'm not much of a gamer or anything i'm definitely not going to try gaming inside of vm but i do like that they are using that zen kernel because that just gives linux desktop users you know another option other than all those distributions that ship with the standard the generic linux kernel you know garuda by the shipping with the zen kernel again i just like that there's another option out there for people back to the menu system let's see of the multimedia category vlc is here and that's all you need vlc can play audio and it can play video of course so that's the only thing here again this is kind of a minimal installation office there's nothing here ocular again but there's no office programs really uh settings is the quantum manager is here our system update tool and we have some garuda stuff the garuda settings manager let's launch that and see what that looks like and this is where we could change our locale settings language packs so you know some of the stuff that you set during the installation time and date things like that if you ever needed to change those settings you could get into the garuda settings manager to change some of that we have a system category here and this is where most of the programs that are installed on the system actually are so you don't have a whole lot of standard applications but system applications you have a lot of them of course we've already talked about the two terminals alacrity and console bleach bit is here that's a system cleaner dolphin of course is kde's file manager let's see how dolphin looks we haven't actually launched it i love the gaussian blur that they've got going on there that looks really cool i love the icons this is ju i can't stress enough just how gorgeous this linux distribution looks and we have the garuda assistant i'm not sure what that is let's launch that okay so this is refreshing the mirror list updating your system you know some of the stuff that typically i do at the terminal most of you guys probably do at the terminal 2 if you use arch or arch based systems but not everybody's going to know those commands to do that stuff so the garuda assistant is definitely good to have for new to arch linux users or people that just want to avoid the terminal you know you can just click one of those uh things here and get that done without actually needing to launch a terminal and actually typing a command or sometimes having to look up that command that's neat that that is there the one that i really wanted to check out is this one right here garuda gamer so let's see what that is all about garuda gamer okay so this is where you can install a lot of your linux gaming stuff so if i wanted to i guess install steam play on linux is here lutress is also here we can install wine wine tricks proton proton tricks so this distribution is definitely geared toward the gamer by having all this gaming stuff on it all these gaming launchers available for you not to mention the fact that it has that zen kernel it's definitely geared toward those that want to do some serious linux gaming also under system we have h-top well let's launch h-top because i haven't even checked out what kind of system resources we're using here now keep in mind this is a vm and also because of all that blurring effect that's going on and everything i expect system resource usage to be sky high especially in a vm when you add all that blurring and all those nice effects they look good but they do suck up a little cpu and a little ram cpu usage i'm using about 10 of the cpu and not really doing anything so typically you would expect you know one to two percent of the cpu being used so that i i can tell you the cpu especially that's probably the blurring effect that's causing that to be a little high memory we're using 1.1 gigs of the four gigs of ram i gave this vm that's pretty high for a plasma desktop but again you know some of the nice effects you know that's going on with the compositor it's probably causing some of that stuff to be a little high also under the system category we have time shift time shift is a really cool program it takes a snapshot of your system so that's basically a way to to back up and restore your system so if you ever have an issue you know you can restore from one of one of the previous snapshots you took and really that's about everything that is installed again very minimal as far as the number of programs of real programs obviously the system utilities category had some stuff in it but for the most part there's no office suite there's really no graphics programs or no multimedia programs other than vlc really you're going to have to install all your standard applications that you probably are going to want to use so if you want to office suite something like libreoffice you're going to have to install it same thing you know for somebody like me if i installed it on my main production machine i'm going to need caden live and audacity and obs and mpv and a lot of the stuff that i work with all the time i'm going to have to go and install all of those programs and that's fine i prefer that approach rather than those distributions that are quite heavily bloated out of the box they ship with a ton of applications pre-installed but the problem is a lot of those applications that are pre-installed are applications i don't use or i'm going to have to swap out with something else something else that i prefer so i like the more minimal approach of not shipping that many applications installed out of the box i'm going to right click on the desktop and let's see how do i change the wallpaper in kde i got to remember how to use kde plasma it's been so long since i've looked at it all right for wallpapers we really just have two wallpapers to choose from the default one and then this one here which is it looks like one of the standard plasma wallpapers actually that looks pretty good too but you know what i think i like the default one better so i'm going to apply that let me go back and right click on the desktop icons and can i change the icons actually what i really need is a control panel i think to change the icon set i just want to see if i can change the icon set or what's available and the default icon set is called beauty line so those of you that want this icon set that's the one to go look for oh the other icon sets are the standard default adwaita icon set which is that default gnome icon set that just looks horrible nobody wants to use that the breeze eye concept which actually is rather nice you guys know what breeze looks like if i hit apply here you know it's just your standard kde breeze icons and breeze dark is also here but honestly i would not change from that beauty line icon set i just think you know that completes the look right that's the total package right there that wallpaper with that icon set and that kde theme it's just it's the most beautiful linux desktop i've ever seen and that's it for this first look at garuda linux this was garuda linux the kde dragonized edition and i really didn't know what i was going to get into when i took a look at this and especially with the name that dragonized name with the 4 6 for the for the ag inside dragon eyes i was like that's a goofy name and a goofy spelling this is gonna be a goofy linux distribution and it's not this distribution i gotta say just for spending half an hour so taking a very quick cursory look at it is really impressive now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of the show devon fran gabe corbini and mitchell akami archaic 530 chris chuck donnie dylan gregory lewis paul pick pm scott and willie they are the producers of the show they are my highest tier patrons over on patreon without these guys this first look at garuda would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well these are all my supporters over on patreon because the distrotube channel is supported by you guys the community without you guys i couldn't do what i do i hope you consider supporting my work look for distrotube over on patreon alright guys peace

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 305,686

Rating: 4.8636732 out of 5

Keywords: garuda, garuda linux, linux, gnu linux, linux distro, linux review, linux distro review, kde, kde plasma, linux gaming, linux vs windows, linux operating system, linux desktop environment, desktop environment, best looking linux distro, linux desktop, linux gaming distro, zen kernel, btrfs, gaming on linux, kde dr4gonized, plasma desktop, distrotube

Id: YSU-4Jy7rk0

Length: 22min 54sec (1374 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020