Garuda was a great distro for a hot minute. It was right where it needed to be to access Steam on Linux right as the Steam Deck came to market. It got all the performance benefits of Proton immediately as other distros had to play catch-up.
It still is a great distro, but it’s lost some is that exclusivity.
I love the eyebleed aesthetic of it I’m just now skilled enough to get that on something like fedora or Debian. And these days what I want is for more things to work easier which puts me out of the arch sphere. If garuda hadn’t committed hard to the aur I’d probably love it but the aur does everything 3 ways 1 of which may still be maintained and it leaves you just wanting the actively maintained flatpak.
Like I don’t hate it, it was the right distro at the time for me as it was noob friendly and had plasma 6 when few others did. But I don’t need the bleeding edge anymore.
I appreciate that arch’s package manager is a bit of a monster - but that’s also what made it the prefect choice for me.
In the immediate aftermath of the release of the Steam Deck, there was many hot weeks where arch’s ability to turn on a dime was exactly the tool needed to run all the new things valve released (fast development to deploy is aur’s specialty). This advantage was destined to not last more than 6 months, as that’s the release cycle for other distros.
Garuda was a great distro for a hot minute. It was right where it needed to be to access Steam on Linux right as the Steam Deck came to market. It got all the performance benefits of Proton immediately as other distros had to play catch-up.
It still is a great distro, but it’s lost some is that exclusivity.
I love the eyebleed aesthetic of it I’m just now skilled enough to get that on something like fedora or Debian. And these days what I want is for more things to work easier which puts me out of the arch sphere. If garuda hadn’t committed hard to the aur I’d probably love it but the aur does everything 3 ways 1 of which may still be maintained and it leaves you just wanting the actively maintained flatpak.
Like I don’t hate it, it was the right distro at the time for me as it was noob friendly and had plasma 6 when few others did. But I don’t need the bleeding edge anymore.
I appreciate that arch’s package manager is a bit of a monster - but that’s also what made it the prefect choice for me.
In the immediate aftermath of the release of the Steam Deck, there was many hot weeks where arch’s ability to turn on a dime was exactly the tool needed to run all the new things valve released (fast development to deploy is aur’s specialty). This advantage was destined to not last more than 6 months, as that’s the release cycle for other distros.
Nothing prevents ya from using Arch to install Flatpack, tho. It’s also really well documented at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Flatpak 😅