This is honestly an AWESOME Linux distro for the technical-savvy and advanced user!!!
It's kinda broken in a few places, but if you don't mind bustin' chops on the command-line and gettin' dirty under the hood, it is TOTALLY WORTH THE EFFORT AND INVESTMENT OF TIME!!!
I personally dig the fact that I couldn't get the installation to complete given a failure to install grub: wonderful opportunity for me to evaluate the Live install USB as a rescue system -- it works well. There might well be a 'chroot' missing from the installer script for this OS, and that might account for the failure to find the /boot/efi partition which was mounted. I'll leave that for someone else to fix, and note what I did to obtain a bootable system: followed the excellent documentation on using garuda-chroot after rebooting into the live install USB. I totally LOVE the SWAY desktop -- having migrated from a long usage of i3.
Coming from i3, using Sway makes me feel like I have been living in a cave for far too long. In similar fashion and coming from the Debian-based-distros, using Garuda makes me feel like I forgot how to breathe, and what fresh air felt like... If distros were like cookies, whoomp! here's your Famous Amos, Ace.
If your idea of fun is like gaining fluency and not mere conversational familiarity with a system / language / whatever, then the package manager's lingo won't scare you away:
-S
-Ss
-Sss
-Sy
-Syy
-Syu
-Syyu
-Su
all mean very different things, and the terseness is true to the historic UNIX speak. Okay, so the first 'pacman -Syyu' failed and I could not update packages because someone in France has an invalidated signature and no updates could be validated. I eventually fixed that and can now update with ease. Again, EXCELLENT documentation on the forums for fixin' stuff...
I'm now totally on board, ain't tradin' my no-longer-broke Garuda with Sway for nothin' -- I ain't goin' back into the cave from whence I arrived here ( i3 on Debian distros for some years... ) !
I solved the OMFG! NUKE OOMD! problem by handicapping systemd's oomd. Yet the symptoms remained, albeit Bitwig Studio no longer was under vicious attack by oomd.
Sway consistently dumps core, and abruptly terminates my login sessions. From a trace on sway while reproducing behavior that consistently causes the SIGSEGV, it becomes clear that the last update I did on the 4th of January included new versions of wlroots and libffi, which seem central to the problem. A backtrace of the coredump from sway shows a call to wlroots and then libffi, and then SIGSEGV.
It turns out that both libffi and wlroots got upgraded when problem started. The problem remains unresolved and prevents me from using certain functionality within Bitwig Studio which initiates the sway coredump. I face three difficult options: attempt a downgrade of a ridiculous number of packages from my local /var/cache/pacman/pkg store; hope and pray the Arch people figure out the snafu and fix it upstream and sometime soon; plan my migration towards another operating system platform.
Other sudden and broken behaviors I have noticed, like chromium no longer launching. Peering into why I discovered a broken set of dependencies all introduced by my last update. In order to hack chromium working again, I did:
cd /usr/lib
ln -s libkvazaar.so.7.2.0 libkvazaar.so.6
ldconfig -v -r /
Then chromium works again. Obviously this is THE ABSOLUTELY WORST POSSIBLE MANNER TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM. Which is why I post this here, to aid improving the update experience for garuda users. Because it is patently clear and undeniable that updating frequently results in a broken system with garuda. I feel we should retain previous shared libraries when we update them. And depending on the nature of version changes to the shared library, links can be made to retain backwards compatibility.
Sorry to hear about your recent issues. Unfortunately, with a rolling distro that is sometimes just the price you pay for being able to run the newest software available. I guess I've just been lucky in my many years of using Arch (and derivatives), of not encountering many problems that I have not been able to overcome.
It sounds like the issues you've encountered are very much out of Garuda's control. Have you filed bug reports with the appropriate upstream projects? You have posted several rants/complaints on our forum recently about Garuda's problems on your system. While this may make you feel less frustrated by being allowed to vent, this accomplishes very little. Filing in-depth bug reports with the upstream projects is the only course of action likely to garner any results. Unfortunately, most of the issues you are complaining about are simply out of Garuda's control and can't really be addressed at the distro level.
Good luck with your issues, hopefully they will be addressed with upstream bug fixes relatively soon. If the buggy software you require is essential to your livelihood, then you may not have any choice but to return to using a static distro until the issues you are experiencing are corrected in newer versions.
Good luck finding the fixes you require. Hopefully we'll see you again in the future, when your issues have been corrected.
I appreciate your response and level headedness. I confess I was pissed. I pretend to be a systems engineer by day, yet at my core I'm a musician. I do feel that Linux and BSDs are at a crucial point in their evolution. The dynamic library / shared dependencies model has failed and should be abandoned, for the sake of system stability and end user enjoyment. I can continue with my music composition in Bitwig Studio - just as long as I don't use subdivisions of a beat granularity in the timer layout. Which sucks, 'cause the song I'm working on is heavily syncopated triplet timing. So I have to wait till the fixes to Sway come down the pike. I did share my coredump analysis with the Swayers and found corroborating evidence to back up my bug find in their cursor.c.
I would much rather have my deps all baked in to each bin. Or implement a better mousetrap, like nix. I dislike the model presented by NixOS only in its form, yet agree with its content. We need to throw in a marketing / design / creative person into the solution think-tank in order to get to the point we have an ATTRACTIVE LOOKING thing -- a functional model is already there. Nix needs simplicity and refinement -- it's too complicated, and non-intuitive, and requires reading and learning a bunch of junk to get the core functionality.
I appreciate your words, my friend. I ain't goin' no where -- NixOS is too ugly for me, no BSD runs Bitwig natively, and you could not PAY me to return to the cave I was in for the last few years: stuck in a Debian-based distro, frontin' i3wm and thinkin' that was coolio...
