Ahahaha yeah man. Like I was trying to resize my btrfs partition as I was screwing with clonezilla and I didn't know what the hell to do so I went back to Windows until I reinstalled Garuda.
1 Like
This is most likely because the Garuda haters down voted your positive review on Distrowatch.
What kills me is how someone will leave a 1/10 review on DW for the most minor of issues. I mean seriously, c’mon Garuda is a completely open and free small independent project. I have been fighting with my Samsung Android phone continuously while trying to make these posts because it’s bugging out. Top of the line phone from Samsung & Google Android (2 of the largest corporations on the planet) and these bugs return off and on with regularity and almost make posting on the forum impossible.
If multi billion dollar corporations can’t get their OS working properly how can someone say Garuda is shite.
5 Likes
I can agree.
I don’t consider Garuda an entry level Distro. And I’ve myself a past in Gentoo. And got in strange problems as it is in normal with any distro (including MS Windows!) if you do more than opening Facebook.
Well ppl are using google for even looking for a sandwich but ain’t able to google a fricking error message? Nor are even able to describe the actual problem. And although the pretext in the preview windows of this forum IS FULL with “enter that, don’t forget that, add that otherwise nobody can(!) help you…” ppl don’t do it. It is their fault. This is not a kinder garden!
Then I suggest we add a new section to this forum for absolute beginners who ain’t able to follow simple an advice or aren’t able to use google and you @caniko can take care of them.
After two weeks we can re-assess your current statements. 
For the rest of us: The bets are open as far as @caniko agrees 
I have no problem with helping someone if they got a problem, even if it takes hours. But I help them regarding to their problem with Linux/Garuda and not personal flaws, I’m not a therapist and I guess most of the Mods and Devs here ain’t either…
Me personally:
I don’t get the entitlement of ppl. If you think something needs to change: change it. 
If you ain’t after changing it SFTU. It is that easy. 
In my opinion a DistroWatch review isn’t that big of a deal. But I don’t have any experience to that subject matter since I’ve never launched a Distro myself. I honestly don’t know. But I guess it isn’t that big of a deal. I also couldn’t care less about “hate reviews” which are based on a simple disagreement whatever it might be. I didn’t choose Garuda based on that but based on my 1 week daily test. That is what reflective and self-responsible ppl do. They take care of themselves and in my situation it is in my case my rig as it is with the software that I use vs Garuda.
Garuda has won the race.
I’d used Gentoo within a blink of an eye but the maintenance especially on a daily driver working rig doesn’t stand for it for me. Otherwise I’d considered Gentoo over Garuda. To be absolutely honest.
I’m against any type of elitism but I’m also against pandering to the dumb folks. In retrospective we can see where its leads us in our society already. I won’t add more to that b/c of Forum Guidlines and it is fine
All the best to you all, keep the penguin fed and the rolling release updated
Bruce 
6 Likes
I really love it, its a solid 10 for me, just had some issues and had to go back my last distro.
Apart from that, I really like it, the chaotic-aur, high performance and Dr4g0nized desktop is really cool.
Also the forum is great!
Thanks for everything!
4 Likes
I understand that you are resorting to sarcasm at this point. Not helpful at all to the conversation.
I'll re-iterate. Yes, it is dishonest. Your stance on the matter is nothing, but anecdotal. It seems like enough people have said most of the early come from Arch that it has become a make-belief fact. If you really want be sure, send out a questionaire!
Seems like a couple of snowflakes downvoted you on Distrowatch, and some of you are being snowflakes about it and take it out on me for providing helpful reasoning (can be found above).
I understand that you are resorting to sarcasm at this point. Not helpful at all to the conversation.
I wasn’t sarcastic, I meant every word.
Seems like a couple of snowflakes downvoted you on Distrowatch
Me? I couldn’t care less. Perhaps it is b/c I’m in the internet since the 90’s and know that it’s not the real world.
Your stance on the matter is nothing, but anecdotal.
That statement makes no sense. What do you expect? A case study made on the MIT just for cementing my personal opinions? Which I declared as such. 
In the end you can’t deliver any rational (even if it is anecdotal) argument here.
Hence I stay with that:
If you’d make something about, we can talk. If not, it is a waste of time. YOU seem to have a problem, then OFFER a solution and work on it. It isn’t that hard to comprehend imho. 
As I said, it is that simple.
Based on your follow up, I’d bet against you. 
I use what works for me, DistroWatch is 
3 Likes
I agree. It might be interesting in terms of download calls to get a hint about popularity but it kinda ends there, for me at least.
1 Like
As much as I love scientific rigor, and thoroughness I don't see the point for this here. You are going to the end of the world to be correct, fine. You base your reality on group think, fine. I couldn't care less
All I ask is that you try interpret me from a positive lens. You are doing nothing but breading toxicity.
On another note. There is no such thing as entry level linux. It is all systemd, and package managers. Pick your flavour, they all suck in their own way.
This, this right here, this is what really just staggers me. Because you’re absolutely right. I see it in reviews, forums, and other channels for feedback/assistance/discussion/etc. Like…? I understand subpar grammar, spelling mistakes, whatever - language is a flexible tool that makes it possible to derive meaning without rigidly following convention - but the sheer inability I see sometimes is just baffling. I can’t wrap my brain around how one could make it through a week on the internet, let alone an entire life, without just learning at least a couple things. Search engines are baked into everything, surely that alone has to be some indication that it takes very little real effort to find specific information, right? Only, it seems that some do stumble their way forward somehow without ever seeming to develop a basic ability to translate even the most directly observable things into coherent thought.
It would be one thing if this was just among stubbornly unchanging older folks or not-quite fully cognizant little kids, but I see this in peers! Grown-ass adults who grew up in the internet, got in many cases more education than me, but you sit them down in front of a computer and ask them to figure out why their out-of-battery bluetooth mouse isn’t connecting and they can’t. Or, even, just ask them to tell you what the problem is, and the single detail they seem to have extracted is “help mouse doesn’t work” despite the blinking red light.
I love helping people, especially with computer nonsense. Beyond the basics, it’s not a skill everyone can or needs to have. I’m happy to take time. I’m understanding and kind when there are real barriers to communication, like age or unfamiliarity or newness to my language. I adapt the level and complexity of what I say to what the person I’m helping needs. I explain what I do, I ask questions to help guide them.
But if someone can’t return just the tiniest sliver of effort - to listen, to try, to be patient, to learn - it’s impossible.
Then you take this to someone who’s gotten through installing an entire other operating system, regardless of how cushy and forgiving the GUI, has some feedback/problem, finds a website to put it, makes an account, spews out some poorly-worded unnecessarily critical nonsense, and what happens? In the best-case scenario, someone actually tries to add some reasonable input, some help that’s less than an immediate fix, and suddenly far more coherent hate rises in response.
Granted, it’s the nature of the internet that these poor cases have such widespread examples. Invisible are the people who did put a little effort in, and either fixed it themselves or did enough that someone could offer a “there’s your problem.” It’s my hope that this is really the bulk of what happens.
This brings me to why this post isn’t fully off-topic, why my original review of Garuda has changed:
The distro is amazing. The dev team is amazing. The community is amazing. To get dock even a point for the odd quirks that’d be present in any distro, the stand-outs of obnoxious threads or comments, the occasional snide, fed-up reply, is absurd.
The fact that such a small team and such a young project is so thoroughly excellent is stunning. It’s a shining light of the beauty in Linux and FOSS in general. And yeah, it’s a shame that these pre-formed surface glances turn into negativity towards Garuda on such a widely-seen platform, but… screw 'em.
I won’t go deeper into each detail I think is great here, nor re-hash my original review that I still pretty much stand by, but I’ll update the number - 11/10. 
7 Likes
Many ppl seem to deal with problems on a premisse of Ignorance is Bliss.
At least it appears to me that way. There may be different reasons for developing that behaviour but in the end it makes no difference which heritage, childhood, qualification and so on a given person has. If they have the Ignorance is Bliss motto in their life or their problem solving thought process. Then you have a pretty damn clear case of help-vampirism.
But if someone can’t return just the tiniest sliver of effort - to listen, to try, to be patient, to learn - it’s impossible.
Help means to support someone to achieve something. Basically that helped one is achieving it, not the helper. Which is the base of my whole essay I wrote in this thread.
It is a philosophical issue of the mindset, in my opinion. Calling someone rude who wants to help and detects help-vampirism is just completely brazen. We can speculate per case if it is a psychological one, hence I wrote:
…] I’m not a therapist and I guess most of the Mods and Devs here ain’t either…
And in the end it is completely brazen with the community (with ANY community) in the end. I wouldn’t even call it an unfair behaviour since it is frankly just brazen. Entitlement, like shoveling responsibility away. In that case shoveling it to the Devs, simply by the imagined reasoning they have build that piece of software that way. Yeah, brazen and cheap. Ppl have stopped to reflect their behavior and their world view for the sake of quick results. Which, in the end will end up in weak results which doesn’t last a decent amount of time. Hence ppl rather throw stuff away and buy a new one instead of DIY-ing it and repairing it. I could write another essay about it but I’ll make it short: @SonarMonkey I agree with your perception.
EDIT answer to @caniko
You base your reality on group think, fine.
No, I don’t, I base it on freedom, in thought, behavior and actions. Which leads to a ton of responsibility and reflection to any individual.
All I ask is that you try interpret me from a positive lens. You are doing nothing but breading toxicity.
I did, but if something doesn’t make sense, then it doesn’t. That’s all I’m telling you the whole time.
I guess there is: You can start with LFS, Gentoo or ArchLinux, or you can start with Mint/Ubuntu. It is a pretty obvious fact that those distros have a huge difference in their learning curve. Heck, even in Windows you need to know stuff. And yes, they all have their positives and negatives. Which is absolutely trivial at this point. I can’t recall that I’ve said something different. I just can repeat myself by telling you: I don’t consider Garuda Linux as beginner friendly as e.g. Mint.
Why?
Because it is based on ArchLinux and you can get in trouble bigtime pretty fast if you don’t have a clue to maintain it properly. Sure the Devs of Garuda did a great job and especially those Assistant-programs are great. But in the end you have to deal with ArchLinux and the Devs needed to have it that way. Otherwise you’d lose all advantages of being on Arch.
And here we go again, like everywhere else in life: If you get more freedom, possibilities and chances you also get more risk. That’s whether ArchLinux’ nor Linux’s fault in general.
My dad told me: You’ll get responsibility if you are grown up. But it doesn’t have to do ANYTHING with your age.
2 Likes
This is what Newbies is supposed to be there for. Unfortunately, some people can’t even manage that and post into Garuda Community instead (an area that’s supposed to be for general discussion rather than for help).
5 Likes
I think most of the negative criticism Garuda gets, from Distrowatch or YouTube or wherever, is from people who don’t really understand what it is.
There is also this bizarre tendency toward unfair expectations with regards to smaller distros, which still perplexes me. If a piece of software or hardware doesn’t work on Windows, people almost immediately accept it and move on–that’s just the way it is, oh well, nothing you can do. But if they install Garuda on their machine and their network card doesn’t work or they can’t install their printer or something, well that’s just a disgrace and how dare you even put Garuda out there for people when it’s obviously all broken and shitty! 
In general, having a bad experience is a more motivating factor for taking the time to leave a review on something than having a good one is. It’s a way of venting your frustration perhaps, or some kind of “this will show them!” In this way, human nature tends to skew these kinds of things toward the negative.
This thread is evidence that there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy with Garuda–even enthusiastically so–who will probably never bother to go to this link right here and spend thirty seconds of their time saying something nice. Not the end of the world–just human nature.
This part here will be a bit OT, but it looks like no one is counting in this thread:
My phone was becoming practically unusable (it’s a 2018 model) and I eventually decided I was going to try flashing Lineage OS on it because I felt like I had nothing to lose. I gotta say, it’s blazing fast now (doesn’t have Google services running in the background). I still experience some glitchiness with the screen (phantom presses), so I think I have some hardware failure creeping in…but if you’re getting fed up with Google Android (talk about bloat!) I’d say consider it.
7 Likes
11/10 all my games on steam ,epic games and ubisoft games launcher are working just perfect ! could not stay with windows a OS that the creators forgot what even (pc) mean lol thx alot i really enjoy too the stability for an arch based distros GG guys.
9 Likes
Nice to hear that and welcome to the Garuda forum 
2 Likes
I think that may be an overall innate skillset that some people have–the empathy that drives them to try to be helpful. Where it becomes unhealthy seems (to me) to be when the helper expects something in return. That’s not help that is bargaining. Even a thank you would be nice, but that is not the point. The gift is in the giving.
Lennon & McCartney said it best, perhaps. “But in the end…the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
My 2-cents from an old hippy.
8 Likes
Ok I cannot pass over this one on my personal experience which explains exactly just that you said.
This winter I was building a miniPC box for my father with Garuda on it. My father is very old and manages super super super bad his computer, I have to limit him in the smallest sandbox as possible but still have very excellent flexibility to tweak things here and there to help him use the machine with only what he needs in his face and nothing more. Trouble reading, seeing, etc… need to play with sizes, colors, etc. Needed to make it almost dumb-free. Garuda is the only distro out of almost 8+ that I’ve tried that allows me to do all that, including maintenance, with the least amount of difficulty (mostly a matter of time rather than difficulty/troubleshooting since I know Garuda enough already).
The 1st box I was setting up for him couldn’t sleep or wake-up correctly, it was erratic with every distro. This feature is an absolute must for him and must be quick and effort-free for him to activate, like on his older iMac. I had a hunch it was hardware issue, I never posted about this, bought a different box and ta-da! Everything worked flawless!
That last thing was to connect wifi on the new box. Of course this one failed cuz the last configuration step sort of always fails, right. loll The wifi is a MT7921K which has proven to be not very good yet with linux-firmware and stuff. But that’s just it, I Whoogled a lot and read a bunch of posts and some apparent fixes, but also that it was pretty new and still not fully supported. It’s impossible for my father to use cable due to home configuration. So I took the AX200 card from my other box and swapped if in the new box, ta-da again! My father is super happy.
So 2 big hardware issues here, none have anything to do with Garuda and just by searching and testing you can see where the problem is and most of it, where it’s not! (Garuda)
Many people would be tempted to think “if it ain’t working it’s Garuda’s fault.” And that’s a reason for them to downvote cuz they’re not doing the basic troubleshooting steps in the 1st place. 
EDIT: The only time I open a help request on the forum is when I am pretty sure the problem is Garuda related or if I tried everything I could (and I have a lot of creativity) think of and still no clue on what the issue is or how to troubleshoot it. Then I post to get ideas from other people. The best example is this one about Whoogle-git not working Whoogle-git self-hosted unable to reach localhost:5000.
I want to thank again @khaneliman for helping on troubleshooting, I would NEVER have thought looking there by myself…
7 Likes
First off, I'm happy to see the Team using Discourse for this forum. Best choice, in my opinion. Thank you.
Sticking with the original question to hand, as of today, I'd rate Garuda as 9/10. No, the missing point has nothing inherently to do with Garuda; rather, it lies more in that fact that I do not believe perfection is attainable.
I was completely unaware of Garuda or the background to the distro or any of that until hearing about it on a podcast several months ago. I gave up on distro-hopping years ago - okay, more than a decade ago and have been using Linux as a daily driver for 13 years. I've primarily used openSUSE and Ubuntu, but tried almost everything. Over the past couple of years, I'd settled on using KDE Plasma and set it up in a way that suited me well to balance getting work done and having fun. For me, this means a balance between the CLI and GUI.
Due to life, I'd not actually looked into Garuda until this past week end. Seeing the screenshots of the Garuda KDE Dr460nized I almost dropped my computer on the floor. It looked as if someone had taken my handmade DE and added the Latte doc and a different background. I was shocked. Literally, the layout, the apps and packages, even the icons were 98% identical!
Last autumn, I got a new (to me) laptop and have grown frustrated with dealing with constant Nvidia driver problems not always playing nice on that distro. If it weren't for that, I'd never even have looked and switched.
It took me less than 15 minutes to install Garuda and almost everything that I use was available during setup/install - a new and pleasant experience. Frankly, Distrowatch is a joke and has been for ages. I don't currently know anyone that takes it seriously or puts any weight into it.
In this divisive world we find ourselves living, people are going to hate and will claim they aren't hating, rather claim they are not standing by some injustice. Those people are only lying to themselves; because, seeing something any differently would turn their worldview and everything they believe on its head. Don't waste your time and energy. Life is too short. I support a zero tolerance policy on hate/religion/politics. My partner would hasten to add that I have a zero tolerance policy for fools as well, but that's not very nice now, is it?
Well done to the devs. Keep up the nice work. I suspect I will find myself using this for a long time.
For anyone who cares:
Host: Dell XPS15
CPU: Intel i7
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (mobile)
Memory: 32Gb Crucial
HD: Samsung 970 Evo Pro NVMe M.2 500Gb (hey, I have 10Tb server in the house so who needs more - for now).
One last point. For some reason, registration emails took almost 3 hours to arrive with my regular email provider. When using a generic "free" email account, I got the registration email in about 60 seconds. I run an instance of Discourse and haven't seen this before.
Edit #3: I forgot to mention, I'm so happy Garuda uses btrfs! Thank you.
5 Likes
I agree with you. However, I could say the same thing about Windows, and it is the preimmenent OS on the planet. As with Windows, Distrowatch is the preimmenent website where most newbs unfamiliar with Linux go to find a distro to test out.
While I find their ranking system a joke, I do take pride in seeing Garuda receive honest and fair reviews that spin it in a positive light. That is just human nature, we all like to recieve positive feedback on something we’ve spent a lot of time working on.
While the rankings may be a joke at DW, it’s influence cannot be denied. Until we were listed at DW we were basically totally unheard of and the forum here was a ghost town. As soon as we were listed on DW our downloads and forum usage exploded. There is no denying that DW still has a huge influence on exposure for a new little known distro.
Like it or lump it, Distrowatch is still like the Pied Piper when it comes to leading the hoards of disgruntled Windows users to a distros doorstep.
4 Likes
That got a good chuckle - thanks.
I do not disagree, but I still find it absolutely dumbfounding, this is true.
As all of you rightly should do!
Your point is well received and I have no argument. But it does not diminish the fact that I am still amazed at the fact after 15 years. Obviously, I need to work on acceptance of some things.
2 Likes