A big shout out to the Garuda folks and a few suggestions

[th3f001]

Section 1 - A BIG SHOUT OUT TO THE GARUDA PEOPLE

First and foremost: thanks to anybody who works on this GREAT project because Garuda Linux is such a cool and good thing on this Earth!

It’s now quite a while since I’m using KDE dragonized as my daily driver and it’s not only a superb user experience but it’s stunningly operational and stable (despite its rolling release soul).
The scripts and optimizations at work behind the scenes are making all this possible and they are a glowing piece of evidence that speaks for the quality of the minds who conceived them.
KUDOS!

In several months of continuous usage (8-10 hrs on a daily basis) this thing still rocks and crunches any single piece of workload I throw at it.
Working stuff with dozens of tabs opened in 2-3 browsers, intensive, memory-hungry apps (i.e. BurpSuitePro), a mix of KDE and GNOME apps, flatpaks, appimages, vms…all the same time and the only few crushes I’ve experienced were due to my own mistakes (…once properly troubleshooted!).

The moment something out of reach for me affected the system, the team fixed the related packages in 24hrs or so. Kinda Apple-style turnaround times, jeeezzz!!!

I’ll surely continue to donate on an yearly basis because I believe this project really delivers tons of good stuff to the users.

Section 2 - A FEW SUGGESTIONS (IF I CAN…)

Please take these for what they are: suggestions, with probably even some personal desires here and there…

a) pre-packaged VMs or a guide on the wiki to help people correctly run Garuda Linux as guest OS
Now, I’m totally getting it: Garuda is designed and optimized to run as a host.
However, transitioning from an old install to a new one can still be hard, plus you might want to have different flavors of DEs on different instances to minimize issues, plus you might want to have a Garuda VM with all your stuff synced just in case ('cause life happens, right?).
Bottom line: there’s more than a reason why a chap might want to virtualise such a glorious experience.

b) a few more sections on the already good wiki or "the bot" way

i.e. How to troubleshoot issues on Garuda Linux as a noob
I know, there’s already the guide on how to improve searching on the forum, the forum itself provides sticky posts to guide users on how to report issues.
However, as user I must say that the very first obstacle in troubleshooting an issue is
I. …“detection” (how do I even know I have an issue on my system?), immediately followed by
II … “correlation” (how do I relate the info I’m finding to the region of the system the issue is originating from?), which finally leads to
III …“the right solution for the correct issue” …there are many ways to fix stuff: which one is NOT going to cause more harm than healing?

The short answer: you gotta RTFM, you gotta know Arch, etc.
This is an over-simplification that leads to a conundrum: if I have to already be an expert before using something, then I would NOT be a noob. A noob needs the tools to gradually elevate himself by gradually understanding more and more…
A good troubleshooting experience is the perfect grind to achieve this while retaining the very same user on Garuda!
“Ok, all beautiful bro but…we simply don’t have the time for educating the noobs.”
Legitimate point.
Fortunately we now live in the AI era: so why not trying to put out a CustomGPT (kinda Arch or Garuda Linux Wingman) for the noob to interact with?
Somebody already had the same idea for Ubuntu…
(This was NOT a provocation…white flag! …it was just to prove somebody else’s got the very same idea…)

c) A section in *Garuda Welcome* or *Garuda Setup Assistant* to further help laptop users
Running an OS on a laptop is not the same as running it on a desktop hw.

• Power profiles
• Scaling governor and related optimizations
• etc. (the list is long and you already know everything about it…)

So why not asking explicitly the user to indicate what type of machine is being used and organize the related configurations steps accordingly?
If it’s already there, just pardon me.
You are victims of your own success as I haven’t reinstalled Garuda for a LONG time now.

Because the truth is: I really didn’t need to.
And the merit is all yours!
Keep up the excellent work!

[NaN]

If you feel the wiki can be improved you can make MR’s here.

Garuda Linux 🦅 / Websites / Wiki · GitLab

Or I believe the garuda team can provide access for WYSIWYG editor access to wiki. Not sure what’s the requirement to get that.

[Bro]

@th3f001

a) pre-packaged VMs or a guide on the wiki to help people correctly run Garuda Linux as guest OS

Not supported.

@th3f001

b) a few more sections on the already good wiki or “the bot” way

5,000,000 ways for something to go wrong and you want pre-help on all of them?

@th3f001

c) A section in Garuda Welcome or Garuda Setup Assistant to further help laptop users

There is no sinecure. Every laptop users needs are different.

@NaN

If you feel the wiki can be improved you can make MR’s here.

Yep!

[th3f001]

5,000,000 ways for something to go wrong and you want pre-help on all of them?

Hmmm…maybe I expressed my thoughts in a poor manner.
I would certainly NOT try to pre-solve all possible issues. That’s impossible.
I was instead thinking about providing users with a troubleshooting methodology coming from seasoned Linux sysadmins / developers.

VMs not supported.

Ok: fare enough. It was worth trying…

There is no sinecure. Every laptop users needs are different.

Again, probably I need to improve my writing skills.
The stress here was not on pre-catering for all possible use cases. That’s impossible.
I was instead thinking about a demarcation line between two broad categories (laptops and desktops) that surely require different sets of optimizations.

Peace.

[SGS]

Seems you did not search in forum.
It’s full of help.

Troubleshooting System Stutter, Lags, Freezes, and Hangs

Hardware Troubleshooting: If the preceding preliminary steps proved fruitless, then it is time to run diagnostic tests to evaluate your hardware's health. You should also perform stress testing to assess your system's stability. Another very important step is to test your system with various live boot disks. Use live boot disks from distros such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or others, (that aren't Arch derivatives). If the freezing also occurs in the live environments (or Windows) , then this de…

Computer doesn’t boot, boots to a black screen, or stops at a message

While there are many potential reasons why your installation doesn’t boot to a desktop, the primary reason is that the graphics drivers haven’t loaded correctly so your login/display manager (DM) doesn’t start. This is why you get a “black screen” or stuck at an [ OK ] Started some service message. The normal reason for this is that you have the incorrect driver version for the kernel. This can happens when the mirror you are updating from is not fully synchronised, or times out, and so y…

and more

Ultimately, users do not search in forums or wikis, nor do they read the template.
Basically, the simplest questions are often asked here because it is easier than doing the search yourself.

If I then have to read that the OP starts his problem description with, I have a simple question, and describes in detail that no garuda-inxi is required for this … why can’t he solve this simple problem himself?

To summarize, there are already all the explanations and instructions on the WWW, arch-wiki, and so on.

Our wiki won’t get any better if we list it here again.

[Gquirt]

I have to agree on the laptop one. Even something as simple as asking if they want the power saving tweaks available in Garuda Assistant.

I recently installed Garuda on a laptop and fully agree. Sure some people will want more or less aggressive power saving, but having a simple “it just works” option for those who don’t want to go down that rabbit hole would be great.

Desktops and laptops do have quite different needs. For my desktop I wanted all the performance tweaks (which worked, yielding +20 FPS in the the game I used for testing over my previous distro). On the other hand, my laptop has plenty of power for the basic web browsing and such I use it for, so I’d rather have the battery saving tweaks.