I am just trying Garuda (suggested on the itsfoss site) on a used Aldi laptop I bought a couple of weeks ago.
4 × Intel® Core™ i3 CPU M 380 @ 2.53GHz
RAM: 7,6 GiB
I have to say: Installation was a piece of cake, and it’s ultra responsive.
It also boots really fast:
╭─me at laptop in ⌁
╰─λ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 4.758s (kernel) + 5.787s (userspace) = 10.545s
graphical.target reached after 5.572s in userspace
It might become my new favourite. Though, I have become used to Ubuntu based distributions and it is still to be seen how easy it will be to deal with an Arch based one when it comes to install programs not in the repository.
What version is this ? Looks like i will give it a try it might be better than deb.
I do like the idea of a graphical program install and think this is what is holding Linux back from taking over the OS market, that and more omni compatible programs like windows programs being compatible with different versions of the windows OS.
It’s the Garuda KDE Dr460nized version, the one featured in the article
I don’t know how familiar you are with Unix style operating systems in general. If not so, I would rather recommend a more established variant. I’m pretty sure, there will be some hiccups due to the fact that this is a very recent development.
There are plenty of Debian or Ubuntu based distributions which will just work fine out of the box.
However, if you are just looking for simplicity, this one has the advantage that it comes with very few programs preinstalled.
I am a bit reluctant to advertise distributions. I believe that you can hardly judge a distribution’s value just by installing and playing around a bit. In-depth knowledge comes with regular use.
This makes it very hard to make fair comparisons. With the enormous amount of distributions out there, it is very unlikely that one person can really and thoroughly know the differences between one or the other. It is obvious that every person who has settled for one has found her favourite and will therefore be somewhat biased towards it.
Now an endorsement
This said and to be kept in mind: In December, I started to use Garuda (inspired by the ItsFoss article mentioned in the previous post) and I now declare the initial testing phase to be over, and I’m still impressed by the careful and thought-through default setups, by the easiness of use and the great responsiveness, despite the fact that I’m using it on rather old hardware (10 years: MEDION® AKOYA® E7216 (MD 98550) ).
Today I found a very enthusiastic and yet quite in-depth review, highlighting the special features beyond the flashy look:
I wouldn’t probably go as far as calling it “The Next-Gen OS for 2021” (look at my caveat), but if you want to try something new, you might want to give it a try.
The last thing to mention is, that many of the developers and maintainers (a team from India, Germany, Australia, Austria, Canada …) are very active in the community forum and tend to respond very swiftly to any issues mentioned.
100% agree. I also would like this to be read by everyone whoever installed a distribution on a second computer/laptop or in a virtual machine.
If you are buying a new phone, new laptop, new computer or install a new operating system, you can’t just play around for an hour with it and be “done” with it. If you really want results that can tell you anything, then you have to tests it for weeks and perhaps months!
But, even then, this wouldn’t be enough to give a generally valid opinion regarding this distribution! Even if you used this operating system for years, you still most likely wouldn’t be able to give an opinion about it, that would account for most users. You have your machine and everyone else may have different hardware. This alone is already one of the biggest reasons, why testing a distribution, especially if only done for a relatively short time, does not say anything about how it would behave on someone else’s computer, from someone else’s perspective.
This is a known problem known across the IT world and that is the exact reason why many games struggle to run on some computers, while they run perfectly fine on others. The same thing happens with Windows OS. You always hear how shitty the updates are, bla bla bla.
Did you ever notice, that most people having those update problems are having update issues with Windows for their first time ever? Pretty much on every update wave, whenever I read the actual comments and posts from affected users, most mention explicitly, that they never experienced update problems with Windows before this specific one. Yet to most readers, especially Linux proponents, it seems like every update is breaking everyone’s computer, though this is most of the time not true.
After all, such things are all a matter of perspective. You may like Ubuntu or Mint and be ready to use it forever. Others perhaps need to use Windows for work reasons.
What I find most important – not only regarding this topic, but generally in your life – is to always stay open minded. Always be ready to learn and change your view about a topic. This is one of the most important things in your entire life.
My most recent example: have been using Debian in so many ways for over a decade. It was my favourite GNU Linux distribution. However, as already foreshadowed here:
I was interested to see what NixOS had to actually deliver, as I was very intrigued by its premises and promises.
Recently, I finally found the time and motivation to try it out and I must say…
From my point of view, it’s the best consumer Linux operating system that you can currently find on earth. Straight up, undeniably. It has only 1 downside: it has a learning curve and if you are not used to Linux or if you are too used to Debian/Ubuntu or one of the other generics (like me), then you will have a hard time getting used to it!
Besides that though, this distribution is amazing and became now my new favourite. Debian is great, but holy shit, NixOS rocks the Linux world!!
What is most important about my discovery is the following:
I have used Debian for such a long time. But I was willing to drop it from the throne it inhabitated, because I remained open minded, open for ideas, open for newer and better operating system solutions. Therefore, here came NixOS and I took it. Now this one lives on the throne. Perhaps it will be a different OS in another decade, who knows. All I have to do, is remain open minded and not try to clinge to stuff that is old, elitistic and just utter crap, from a modern day perspective.
(cough Looking at you, hardcore C fans… cough)
Hi C.J - If you want to find the huge Elephant in the room go here:
Perhaps the serious issues they highlight; not mentioned thus far will not bother you? Perhaps they will - much better to get a balanced view before you start.
What…! The expert at DistroWatch as you well know has the opposite view…
“Both editions, and I remind our gentle readers that I was running the Lite editions, used about twice as much RAM as the same desktops consume on virtually every other distribution I have tried. That is based on the statistics from free while Conky suggests Garuda is even heavier, which struck me as unfortunate given how much focus the project claims to give to performance and efficiency.”
There are a shedload of other issues too - Oh Dear
Hope this helps
@Andy2 To make it clear again: I am not advertising anything and do not have vested interests in the project. I’m merely describing my personal experience, which happens to be far better than I originally expected. I came for the looks, but stayed for the inner values.
The video (Did you watch it? To the end?) explains far better than I could in this brevity, the many features, which you are free to like or dislike.
Whether somebody else (the guy from distrowatch) experienced performance issues, I simply can’t say. How could I? I’m not him and I didn’t.
Citing him ten times, won’t change what I experienced.
He also complains about other issues which would indeed bother me a lot, had I experienced any of them. Sorry, I didn’t, but this is also hardly guarantees that you, or anybody else for that matter, wouldn’t.
As far as the RAM issue goes: You seem to be rather obsessed with it. The point is, according to the distribution’s website, higher RAM usage is deliberate, in order to increase responsiveness. You are simply comparing apples and oranges: This is certainly not an operating system intended to be used neither on servers nor on single board computers.
In that sense: Try it, if you like and tell us your personal experience. If you don’t want to: let it be. There are far more important things in life than Linux distributions.
I may very well understand why you want to type your post
in a text editor to try it out first, but it is helpful to look at the result of your ctrl-c / ctrl-v operation on the right of your screen.
The problem here is simply the wrong use of typography:
In English, the apostrophe ’ is used to show the omission of letters, e.g. in contractions:
In programming languages, it is often an alternative way of quoting strings:
str1 = 'a'
str2 = "b"
ln some languages, both quoting mechanism can be semantically different.
However, instead of an apostrophe, @C.J consequently uses the grave accent `:
like here in “caffè” (“coffee” in Italian).
The problem with that is that this editor and others which also use the “markdown” notation for adding rich-text features, interpret text enclosed in graves (also called “backticks” or “backquotes”) as code and display it in typewriter letters without the signs themselves. The use of them, obviously screws the text up.
In computing, they are heavily used, say in the database query language SQL, they mark names of tables or columns and must not be confused with quotes. The results might be entirely different sets.
Same in programming languages: backticks often mean that the expression enclosed in them is to be executed as a command:
$a = 'ls'; # $a now contains the string "ls"
$a = `ls`; # $a now contains the content of the current working directory
However, in written natural language, correct punctuation does matter, too:
It drives me completely nuts, if somebody writes semantic bullshit by setting wrong or omitting apostrophes:
you are crazy = you’re nuts ≠ your nuts = the peanuts or cashews belonging to you
or: “The human thinks, God leads.” is not the same as “The human thinks: God leads.”
I am aware of the difference in typography «’» is not «’» and for a while I wanted all my documents to have the second.
I even reprogrammed my keyboard to get it «’» all the time.
Perhaps, just perhaps, @C.J is using MS-Word to write the text before posting it. And MS-Word has the tendency to put «`» where «’» fits better.
This
explains the case well.
I just hope @C.J is still around and able to read our posts.
Hi Mina, since you find it necessary to repeat yourself may I do likewise… without any intimidation and threats of a ban by PM hidden from our wonderful diverse it’sFOSS membership…? Thanks to the big man, with a big heart - @abhishek he has graciously allowed me to defend myself - as would any other decent person - without threats from you or others. It’s much better out in the open. What do our dear readers think…?
So let me now repeat myself…
It is abundantly clear to our membership or any transient visitor that, until I joined the conversation, you were all on a one way groupthink trip extolling the supposed virtues of Garuda whilst withholding or hiding pertinent information that you well know of, from this valued it’sFOSS member - quite disgraceful - and from two moderators who should know better.
It is the usual boring orchestrated jive - it’sFOSS do a review then the usual suspects back it up and promote the review on its forum - what a cheesy tired tactic…? After the last article by Dimitrios Savvopoulos on lubuntu which attracted so many negative comments; I just simply wouldn’t bother…
Now we have comments on the Garuda FOSS review… please note request for RAM usage as your colleague failed to mention performance at all - A Freudian Slip… LOL
You are now saying that you can’t say whether DistroWatch…> “ experienced performance issues, I simply can’t say. How could I?” I think you owe me yet another apology on the same subject about the same distro… can you believe it…
… and you responded "You’re right, I have to take back some statements” - and now you are at it again as though nothing happened - saying you know nothing about any bad experiences he encountered testing that steaming pile of RAM hungry … Are you serious… and that was just the Lightweight versions… LOL… running on 6MiB RAM - FULL version of Trisquel runs fast and snappy doing work on just 3MiB RAM
Who buys a car, motorcycle, washing machine or any other product without checking out its efficiency - I for one would not be that stupid.
Hey @Mina do you want to check up on this or do I need to make corrections - again just trying to be helpful to our membership
I know I should not be posting music as you tried to get me to withdraw my Doomscroller post with threat of a ban hidden by use of a PM - but…
That great musical genius Frank Zappa even put it to music…
Much, much better on Vinyl with B&O speakers - loads of great vids too Also check out his son Dweezil and his daughter Moon Unit - a real Val (Valley Girl) - Have fun
…Ruth Underwood, Napoleon Murphy Brock, and Jean Luc Ponty, just to name a few. The record also featured some excellent (if uncredited) backing vocals from Tina Turner and the Ikettes.
I think Jack Bruce of Cream was in there too - perhaps @daniel.m.tripp aka Freewheelin’ Franklin Freek, - note the Apostrophe - can help out here with his vast music and band knowledge…?
Ah - those were the days my friends - I used to sell IT International Times back then.
I have no idea what you’re talking about… I’ve never professed, or bragged, about having a “vast” knowledge of anything… I know a little, about a lot, of stuff, but not a lot about anything specific…
As for Frank Zappa - I can’t stand his music… really… when I first got my own money to buy rekkids with (the black 12" thingies) I was so disappointed when I bought a Zappa & Mothers album - thinking it would be some kinda hard rock with a psychedelic “bent” or something - and it was this silly jazzy stuff, and songs about doylies etc, and grated on my ears… I have since, never ever, on subsequent listens, been able to endure any of his material… I understand his contribution to music, and he’s rated as a very talented guitarist, but it’s just not to my taste…
He was a good friend, and early collaborator of Captain Beefheart, another “avante garde” musician, I prefer Beefheart to Zappa, but I actually prefer Beefheart “afficionados” and those inspired by him/them, even more, like Tom Waits and Polly Jean Harvey (I LOVE PJ!).
About the only " Freewheelin’ " music I’d be into from the 1960’s would be Dylan - e.g. 1963’s (the year after I was born) “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” (but I prefer Mr Zimmerman’s later albums : John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Blood on the Tracks and Desire).
As for apostrophes, there are all kinds, there’s 6 9 quotes, and 66 99 quotes, and just straight apostrophe / single quotes or doubles… As some here no doubt may have experienced the issue of copying CLI strings from some source (e.g. a shittily formatted DOCX file!) that’s decided to format the quotes as 6 9 or 66 99 (when what we need is just single quote >'< or double-quote >"< - and how do you even quote, quotes??? Sure we can escape them in a shell script). And there’s the other kind of quote char that I can’t type here because it tries to use that as markdown formatting character, I’m talking about the one that’s on the same key the US keyboard key for tilde “~”… I used to use those quotes to assign the output of a command line to a variable - but now I do it like this instead :
My friends and I go to see the “Magic Band” when they play local gigs in UK.
So strange to see Guys that old still playing the same music albeit with new vocalist. Tom Waits is great musician too.
Yes Zappa’s contribution was huge and so much more talented than Beefheart ever was or could be - he even conducted his own music played by the Royal Symphony Orchestra. Strange that so many of the World’s top musicians asked or begged (Steve Vai) to play in his band as they now do with his son Dweezil…
You have posted many, many times about music and bands on this forum so thought you were knowledgeable - I obviously got that wrong - Sorry
He is also strange for making at least four “Anti-Dug Use” tracks starting I guess with Cozmic Debris yet died of cancer smoking cigs and swilling beer - I dig him most for saying it is OK to think free and **** the war, establishment, political and social correctness. He famously exposed Jimmy Swaggart as a sick joke and went through the Law Courts to defend his rights and my rights too - What a Guy RIP…
in the room go here:
running on 6MiB RAM - FULL version of Trisquel runs fast and snappy doing work on just 3MiB RAM 
(but I prefer Mr Zimmerman’s later albums : John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Blood on the Tracks and Desire).