Howdy, I'm happy to have found this community and want to introduce myself. First though, a summary of my first impressions:
Garuda is cool, it's fun, it's thoughtful, it's interesting, and it's smart. There's very few things from the out-of-the-box experience that I don't prefer and only one of those are workflow problems. For someone as picky as myself, that's rare. Seriously awesome work with the OS.
My name is Dave, on the internet I'm called dis7ant and have been using linux since around 2004 when I installed SuSE 9 on my shiny new Compaq AMD64 laptop.
I've been fascinated by electronics my whole life and spend a lot of time tinkering with computers. I'm more of a hardware guy than software, but I've recently been learning a lot of software skills while helping to build and maintain a website called den.social. Before this I worked for Siemens, where I first learned programming professionally (building automation), and I also spent ten years in the U.S. Navy working mostly on the Tomahawk Weapons System.
I found the Garuda distro after researching forks of Firefox. I haven't been happy with my browser for a while and didn't want to just keep using Chromium, so I read all the things on all the forks until I decided FIreDragon was interesting enough to pull the proverbial trigger on. Honestly if it hadn't been for FireDragon I might have never noticed Garuda, I was pretty content with Manjaro already and not looking to replace it.
It's as if someone set out to modify Manjaro based on what someone like me would probably do to it. Already being a KDE fan the 'dr460nized' option is awesome, and as someone finally coming around to trusting btrfs enough to use on my workstations and a couple of servers it is nice to have someone else do all the initial setup for me. I'm just now getting used to dealing with subvolumes and such, Garuda made it easy to dive into that new fs.
I'll be using Garuda on my laptop and writing a lot with Joplin. I'll also be using a lot of "web3" tools and finding out what FireDragon does well (dark mode) and doesn't handle (videoconferencing). After I spend some more time with it I want to write up a thorough review that doesn't gloss over the technical/minor differences I've already been noticing. I'll publish that in our "linux lair", which I invite anyone to help us build if you're interested (I'm currently looking for more owners).
Last note: this forum is set up pretty darn well, I like the helper that pops up on the first two posts and the "your topic is similar to" thing as well. As someone who runs a forum I can appreciate how helpful that probably is, both for new users and for people who don't want the forum covered in posts that aren't interesting or doesn't add to the conversation.
See y'all around!
