Garuda Linux - The Best "Just Works" Distro?

it's been a while since i've done a distro review and today i'm going to be looking at one that several of you have requested me to take a look at and that is garuda linux now this is another arch-based gnu linux distribution that many people are actually saying is the best archbase distro that's out there right now which is a pretty big claim considering just how many archbase distros are floating around out there and you can download the distribution and also get more information about it at garudalinx.org now let's just take a moment to admire this website it looks really clean it looks really modern and it also doesn't rely too heavily on javascript so if you do want to block scripts in your browser for whatever reason the website is still pretty much going to function the same way another thing i really like is that here at the top of their page one of the first few links that they have takes you to the download page so that's great i always love when different linux distro sites actually take me to the page that i want to go to right away to actually download the iso and get started with it now at the top of this page we have the minimum requirements listed out and we can see that it wants us to have 30 gigabytes of storage space four gigabytes of ram a video card with opengl 3.3 or better and a 64-bit system so this is definitely not a minimalist gnu linux distro it's more meant to be a just works distro that also has a lot of eye candy and looks really modern i would say that this is more the type of linux distribution that maybe newbies are going to use who are looking for an alternative to running windows 10 so if you're looking for a distribution to run on an old thinkpad you might not want to go with this but if you had something like a gaming laptop or desktop with eight gigabytes or more of ram and a quad-core processor and a fairly new graphics card and you wanted to run gnu linux on it then garuda is going to be a really good choice for that now we also have the installation procedure here which i think is pretty useful because again this is probably something that people newer to linux are going to use and maybe they don't know how to go into their bios and boot from a flash drive so that's really good now if we scroll down a bit more we can start seeing the different flavors of garuda that they have so like they have a kde edition xfce uh gnome uh lxqtk win and also a wave fire which is a um using wayland but this is the most popular one and also why they listed it first the garuda kde dragonized spelled with leetspeak so really cool this is the one that i'm going to be showing off in a virtual machine and they also have a couple special editions of it so they have the um kde dragonized gaming edition uh which comes with some additional software that good new linux gamers would really like like steam uh lutress wine and the glorious egg roll custom proton settings uh there's also the kde dragonized uh black arch edition so this is going to be sort of like kali linux this is going to be in case you didn't know black arch is basically a penetration testing distro that's based on arch it actually has even more tools in it than kali linux does so yeah this is sort of like black arch but i guess uh for people that don't want to run i can't even remember what window manager black arch comes with but it's a very minimalist version so this is i guess a just works pen testing edition sort of like uh kali linux or the parrot security but this is garuda's version of it and finally another thing that i like is that all of these different distributions you have the option of downloading it via a torrent which is definitely the way that i would prefer to download my linux distros so that is really cool alright so this is the first screen that you'll get when you first try to boot up garuda linux i'm using it in a virtual machine and just as a brief aside they actually mention on the garuda website to not run it in a virtual machine because certain things are not going to work correctly now that's perfectly fine for me because i'm just booting this up and i'm going to be showing some of the features of it i'm not expecting it to work super fast certainly not as fast in a vm as it would on bare metal but just keep that in mind if you were thinking of actually using it in a virtual machine for some reason so we have the option of booting with either open source drivers or to boot allowing the proprietary nvidia drivers so i'm going to go ahead and do that because i am using nvidia nvidia graphics card uh and frankly the open source drivers for nvidia really suck because nvidia doesn't give that development team any help at all like amd does they don't make it uh easy for people to develop open source drivers for nvidia hopefully i can go ahead and switch to an amd card just as soon as they're actually available all right so we are here in the initial setup uh one thing that i do really like that i just noticed right away is whenever you click on an application it sort of blurs your desktop background to i guess focus it um so yeah this is the kind of you know this is a kde thing and this is kind of what i was talking about and why it's really not a minimalist distro is because they do a lot of eye candy stuff like this which again this is perfectly fine if you're using a modern machine but you're using something really old like maybe a core 2 duo you might not really want to run this so uh let's see what we got so we can of course uh explore garuda a bit but why don't we just go ahead and install it um we have this welcome screen so let's see is the installer here we've got garuda assistant garuda settings manager system cleaner okay here it is install garuda linux uh oh and it also looks like there's an install right there all right so this is a just works distro so installing is just as simple as reading the instructions on the screen so we'll make it american english best kind of english there is uh sure new york is close enough um got english we got default keyboard um yeah let's erase the disk and i won't use any swap um you could set up swap here if you wanted to um i guess that's good that they don't necessarily give you swap because i i guess they're assuming that people are going to be installing this on machines with like 8 gb 16 gb and maybe you don't need swap if you've got that much ram but you know let's not have a whole big debate about swap uh so yeah we'll do our password and i also like that they don't force you to use like eight character or more passwords i mean i get that uh it's more secure to do that but i don't like being forced to use long passwords um yeah all of this looks good so it's just giving us like an overview of what we're gonna do for setup this could probably be better it's like black on black and kind of difficult to read it says unpartition space or unknown partition table and let's go ahead and install now yeah i mean relatively painless thing to install i mean pretty pretty easy to set up but that's how it just works distros work for you um let's see they see we're only focused on performance yeah so so when i was reading up about this it basically looks like they're kind of marketing this as almost like a gaming distro and not necessarily just for gaming it's not like you know steam os where it's almost like a console type of setup this is probably for the person who might be doing some work on their computer you know maybe office work or something like that but they also want to do some gaming i i would say it's almost like a windows replacement right uh because of course on pretty much any linux distro you can you can game but there's a lot of work that goes into getting steam set up getting it set up with proton and then especially if you want to do like proton ge that's something where you literally have to go and download it from github and then you have to put the folders into steam and all of that can be very very intimidating if you're new to linux or even if you're just new to computers in general i mean how many windows users are doing that kind of stuff right maybe if you're someone who knows how to install mods uh because then you're sort of going into game files and and putting things in different places but how many gamers use mods right it's it's a small percentage of the community so i really like that they're trying to make this really easy uh for gamers i'm probably gonna have to get uh maybe a gaming laptop i think one of my friends might have one that i can borrow and try to install garuda to that just to see how smoothly it it is to do that and how easy it is to actually get gaming uh with garuda so i'm gonna go ahead and pause the recording now while this finishes installing all right so the installation is finished only took about 10 minutes or so but i noticed while it was installing that i only had one processor passed for my virtual machine so i'm going to go ahead and actually give it another processor let's see how can i shut this down here we go yeah you can see it's it's lagging quite a bit so definitely need to give it like two or three cores okay we are rebooted now with three threads provided let's go ahead and log in let's see it's asked us do you want to start the setup assistant to finish your installation uh sure i don't think i'm really going to install anything additional but let's just go through this we'll go ahead and update the system and then this is where it's going to select some other packages so i guess by default it's not really installing too too many packages um but yeah let's go through this and see what we need do we need additional fonts now printer scanner support nope uh don't need extra wallpapers don't need additional components um so then software centers gnome firmware uh app image launcher um pacman oh i guess that's the gui software center so maybe by oh pamac okay my uh dyslexia was kicking in there yeah that's right that's the um gooey front end for pac-man uh so that's pretty cool and let's see octopi [Music] a qt gui software center all right and then we also have um discover which is the one for kde so yeah lots of different software centers that you can select uh additional kernels by default this is using the zen kernel which is uh better for game gaming it's pretty much one of the more like responsive uh kernels for that type of workload which again just more evidence that this is supposed to be sort of a gaming distro office suite so yeah here you can choose a libreoffice and that's the one that's recommended the full featured office suite but then you can also choose for things like free office if you want um browsers so wow this is a pretty this is a lot of different browsers so we can get libre wolf firefox firefox esr chromium on google chromium uh viveldi opera even the tor browser pretty much every browser brave is here pretty much everything that you could possibly want um i'm not seeing surf though i mean they have some other uh i guess kind of more obscure browsers like otter and c monkey but they don't have surf i mean why not why not include a minimalist browser there okay so for male clients thunderbird kmail yeah again lots of different male clients you get to choose communication software all right so telegram discord again you're going to need that if you're gaming uh neochat fractal element wow they got a lot on here wire signal uh jitsi meet zoom skype and they point out that they're both proprietary as well as uh microsoft teams and slack even mumble and the twitch gui wow so many options uh more communication software uh audio software yeah pretty much everything that you would want there video software um vlc kdnlive okay but i'm not seeing i got obs but i'm not seeing mpv i'm also not seeing blender since video editors are uh being mentioned here um i don't see sh oh yeah shotcut is there okay yeah so there's definitely some things missing from here they should have mpv oh i just noticed the little a little wiggle of that box that's pretty cool all right let's see graphic software so is here my paint um lots of other ones that i've never even used creda is here all the apps uh multimedia software okay maybe blender is in here see they got handbrake um still not seeing blender though or um kdnlive they got easy tag that's a nice little audio editor tool really useful if you want to add like album information or artist information to songs you might have downloaded from youtube dl extra games don't need extra games uh development software okay so you can get visual studio code um gnu emacs i'm not seeing vim so hopefully vim is already installed on here uh virtualization software vert manager virtualbox everything you could want is there and then just other software um and yeah let's go ahead and remove the setup assistant because i guess we don't need it anymore and yeah all of this i mean like you just saw i didn't need to use a terminal to install or in this case skip installing any of that like it's just works distro it's going to be really easy to use and you probably won't even have to touch the terminal too often so yeah if you're thinking about using linux but the terminal scares you this may be a good distro for you to use and then we have a nice little welcome screen so let's see what's through here so garuda assistant um isn't that what we were just using oh no this is something different oh okay so this is sort of like your control panel i guess so we've got a system update you can reinstall all packages so i guess you do that if your system's broken refresh the mirror list refresh the key rings remove orphan packages clear your package cache and edit repositories if you want to install something custom let's say we have a place here to manage our file system there's also system components so you can just tick on if you want pulse audio support jack support also support looks like by default they're doing pipe wire which is also pretty cool that's that's what um a lot of the more modern distros are doing and also it's just kind of seen as the modern way of uh doing audio pretty much pipe wire is pretty much just as compatible as pulse audio but a little bit less bloated than pulse audio and then let's just look in our settings um switch shells so it looks like bash is our default shell i wasn't sure about that when i first started it because if we launch console here it's telling us that fish is our default shell and uh this is one of the things that i was going to kind of criticize uh garuda for because look i get why they chose shell of the fish shell in case you didn't know it literally stands for the friendly interactive shell and it's probably one of the most user-friendly and easy to use shells that are out there so maybe it does make sense on a distro that's supposed to be easy to use but it's not fully posix compliant and that can cause some problems if you're writing your own shell scripts that are going to utilize things that are unique to fish but then maybe not in other shells because then if someone on bash or zsh tries to use it that script just won't work right um i'm also like a little skeptical of the core philosophy of fish like just how easy does a shell have to be for you to use in my opinion whenever you start using the shell regardless of what os you're using it on that is when the training wheels start to come off i mean you just saw between that setup manager and between the garuda assistant how easy it is to configure your system without actually having to touch the shell but when you get into it and you decide to interface with your os more directly through a shell instead of through some sort of gui abstraction i just think it's better for you to learn that in a way that's at least posix compliant but anyway upon closer inspection it appears that we actually are using bash even though it says fish up here so yeah that's um pretty cool you can also switch to uh zsh if you want let's see for dns oh you can also enable ad guard dns so that's pretty cool for blocking ads let's see and there's performance tweaks that are in here as well this is really cool all right let's look through some of the other options we have we have the garuda gamer so this is where uh you can configure all those different uh gaming things that uh we saw earlier in the like gaming edition you don't actually have to download that edition necessarily it is a much larger iso because it just comes with these things locally instead of having to download it from the internet but yeah you can see all this stuff here steam the heroic games launcher lutress or lutrus not quite sure how you pronounce that one um itch which best way to play itch.io games i don't even know about that um yeah we got play on linux wine wine tricks proton ge proton tricks obs like so many things that are just essential if you're going to be a gamer on on any os but especially on linux when we're talking about things like wine and proton to provide that compatibility uh let's see what else we have we have the garuda network assistant so this is probably for managing like wi-fi connections yeah nice easy way to manage your network connection so we've got our linux drivers here and windows drivers which we don't need because we're not going to be running windows all right what else do we have here the garuda boot options so this is probably going to be a way to edit grub i'm imagining uh yeah looks like it so you can boot to garuda change the default boot options yeah i mean it's it's got so many like gooey front ends for doing all these different things you would normally do with the shell so it's definitely a just works distro you're not gonna it doesn't look like you're gonna have to go into console too too often um we've got a partition manager we've got time shift uh this is really cool so this lets you take snapshots of your system so that you can easily backup and restore it um what else do we have here we'll close time shift we don't need to show that off effect i'm pretty sure i've done a video about time shift in the past so if you're curious about it go check that out um we have a system cleaner so this probably uh let's see is it even gonna run okay maybe it's because we just installed the system it's like hey you don't need to run that uh add and remove software again something that you would normally do through the terminal i would normally do through the terminal you don't have to do it um yeah and we have blender to download here yeah so this is all the um software to add we got to go to install i guess to start removing things um there's actually not too much on here already it comes with h-top i like that my favorite process manager okay we've got a text editor kate and all these um ade connect so that you can interact with your system via your phone uh kde partition manager i mean did i see okay i thought i saw um g part up there as well i was about to say why do we have two partition managers uh console of course um oh mpv is already installed okay all right i was i was criticizing them for having uh vlc listed and not mpv but hey they didn't have to list it because they installed the best movie or best media player by default let's see system settings yeah this is man this is looking really nice all right so let's start going through the software that's in our dock down here um of course there's the welcome console let's see what fire dragon is all about all right so this looks like it's firefox just with some additional add-ons installed so we have the clear urls add-on so this is to um make sure that you don't go to any ip grabbers or anything like that if someone's trying to um like send you a link to go click on pretty useful piece of software canvas blocker so this helps to block canvas fingerprinting uh when you go to websites it sort of helps to prevent them from figuring out what operating system and what browser you're using dark reader so this just gives you the nice dark theme on sites that maybe wouldn't necessarily support it and ublock origin is also installed by default that's that's huge that's like the universal add-on where you basically know whether or not somebody is like is like a super noob or if they're a little bit more advanced at least as far as browser configs go is whether or not they have u-block origin installed uh so let's open up the dashboard here did they go ahead and configure it for us fully no they didn't because they're not preventing webrtc from leaking local ip address this is something that can be a bit of a problem if say you're using a vpn or a proxy in your browser to try and prevent people from figuring out your ip webrtc can leak it sometimes so i don't know i mean if there's if there is a way to have this box checked by default i think that would be the um better thing to do blocking javascript that seems a little bit extreme like most regular people using this probably aren't going to want javascript blocked they're going to say oh no my browser's broken it's like now just the paradigm of the modern web is broken and everyone uses javascript where it's not always necessary um is start page our default um i don't know let's see oh actually sir x is the default search engine holy moly wow they actually picked like the best possible search engine for default that's really cool man i'm really really impressed by this distro so far and again it just looks it looks so awesome i'm really digging this little wiggle when i move the uh when i move the um screen around or when i move this um program around of course we have dolphin as the default file manager since we're using uh kde and yeah all the typical types of folders that you would have they're all color coded so that's really nice let's see here's kate down here so this is our just regular default text editor like a uh notepad basically discard that um let's see and then there's our time shift and then there's kde connect let's go through the applications that we have here so all applications um there is a lot there's an emoji selector so i guess that's for um like copying and pasting uh smileys something like that see copy to the clipboard and then we'll open up kate yeah there we go okay yeah that's that's definitely going to be an important application um let's go through this some more fire dragon so of course that's the fire fox uh fish which i've already talked about fish and gave my opinions on that um let's see hardware show hardware topology oh okay that's pretty neat so it's actually showing you the different um cores or threads rather that are connected to my system and then i believe that this is cache that is shown here so there's like level one well two level ones and then a layer two and then level three so that's pretty cool let's see what other applications do we have in here let's try to find some more really useful stuff kate console [Music] mpv of course uh we've got the ocular document viewer so you'll want that for viewing your pdfs and some different qt apps uh reboot software token yeah there's really not a whole lot that's on here it doesn't even look like yeah we don't even have an office suite that's installed on it by default um so i guess most of this um wait because i can tell that it's that it's kind of heavy that's why i gave it so much ram and and another cpu thread compared to what i would normally give it let's actually go into our um let's go into our h-top and see how much we're using all right so we're just under a gigabyte of ram usage uh with pretty much nothing else running uh and then we're around looks like we're going between eight and two percent on our cpus so yeah i mean that's kind of or i guess between twelve and two percent so yeah i guess that's to be expected with this much eye candy you know obviously it might seem a little bit slow and laggy but that's because i'm using it on a virtual machine as long as you have um you might not even need dedicated graphics for this i know it said video card on the website but i would imagine that that also includes integrated graphics like if you're especially if you're using a newer cpu that's going to have better integrated graphics than something like a core 2 duo uh yeah i would say if you're using a modern system that's not super cheap like 500 or more that this would be the perfect distro to run on it now let's go ahead and close the window i really have to say bravo to the garuda team for creating such a nice modern looking gnu linux distribution i'm definitely going to be revisiting this distro once i have a gaming laptop to test it on to see just how easy it is to get started as a gamer on linux using a distro that will hopefully make that setup very very easy for me

Channel: Mental Outlaw

Views: 52,655

Rating: 4.9040666 out of 5

Keywords: Mental Outlaw, mental, outlaw, garuda, garuda linux, linux, gnu linux, linux distro, linux review, kde, kde plasma, linux gaming, linux vs windows, desktop environment, best looking linux distro, linux desktop, linux gaming distro, zen kernel, btrfs, gaming on linux, kde dr4gonized, garuda linux dragonized, garuda dragonized, garuda linux 2021, garuda linux download, arch linux, arch based distro

Id: _ZCEiFA8ezA

Length: 31min 12sec (1872 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/linuxforme]

I feel like every distro now a days is marketing itself as “just works”, but to be honest I rarely have a Linux distro not “just work”. To me it’s all basically the same.

This is especially true with distros that are said to “be good for gaming” like Garuda or pop os. Nearly every distro has the exact same incompatibilities, and besides compatibilities you can’t really do much more in the way of gaming.

[u/DlRKDIGGLER]

Not my video but I'm a big fan of his stuff. Looking forward to taking Garuda for a spin.