Hello, dear community!
It is a pleasure to announce another release of Garuda Linux This release is named Bird of Prey and it is the first release of the year 2024. We planned to introduce this one much earlier - shortly after KDE 6 was released back in February - but due to real life keeping some of us busy and a nasty bug causing some machines to not boot up during testing, we needed a little extra time to get everything ready. Nevertheless, pushing the ISO release wasn’t necessary to have our old ISO still working thanks to Garuda System Maintenance being able to automatically migrate the newly installed systems to Plasma 6
The main focus of this release is certainly the already mentioned Plasma 6 upgrade which already arrived in the Dr460nized edition. Meanwhile, Sway and Hyprland received some major improvements to their respective editions as well. Also, FireDragon was rebased to Floorp, meaning we now profit from its interesting feature set. Lastly, our build system for the garuda
repository received major updates, and the pilot phase for Chaotic-AUR infra 4.0 is supposed to start soon
Dr460nized and KDE 6
As KDE 6 was released in February, the Dr460nized edition underwent some minor changes to how we create our desktop layout. Multiple plasmoids needed to be ported to KDE 6, which also caused some of them to be replaced with updated forks (eg. the original Latte dock window-{title, appmenu, buttons} are no longer maintained and were ported or forked by other people). Before the initial release of KDE 6 in Archlinux repositories, a lot of community members participated in testing the configurations via the dedicated chaotic-aur-kde
repository (building master branch packages). Meanwhile, our Garuda System Maintenance tool got updated with the ability to migrate KDE 5 Dr460nized editions to KDE 6. As soon as KDE 6 was released in Arch’s repos, the migration was automatically triggered for everyone using non-customized Dr460nized themes, also linking to our Wiki article to provide information for everyone who didn’t keep up to date with those ongoings. The overall appearance stayed pretty much the same apart from some aspects like the system tray, which now uses the current theme’s icons instead of hardcoded ones. Other KDE 6 goodies like a much improved (and now default!) Wayland session, partial HDR support, and enhanced touchpad gestures can all be attributed to the great work of the KDE developers. They have done a great job and many of the bugs present in the first release version were fixed very quickly. There was also an actively discussed announcement in our forum, in which many members participated.
Sway
Sway underwent some nice changes as well! We took a closer look at some of the major changes in this topic back in February. This will be the first release featuring these changes in the main ISO on the downloads page.
The Greetd greeter has been changed to ReGreet for a simple, clean login experience. SwayFX has been added to enhance the visual effects of the desktop. Waybar has been reworked to update the appearance and add funtionality, and nwg-drawer has received a facelift as well. The screenshot tool has been changed to Swappy and the clipboard manager has been changed to Cliphist, with new bindings for both. Speaking of bindings, the cheat sheet has been completely overhauled to help new users get their bearings. New to this release, the default terminal has been changed to Foot and the launcher to Fuzzel (both Daniel Eklöf projects). Finally, this release features a new SGS Wallpaper.
Hyprland
Our Hyprland maintainers decided to provide a video to showcase the current status of Hyprland
The rest of the changes can be read in changelog format
List of changes
Feat
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garuda-hyprland-settings: switch G-Hyprland script to tiled mode instead…
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garuda-hyprland-settings: resolve themeing issues related to qt6 apps
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garuda-hyprland-settings: fix hyprlang error logs on monitor
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Add-garuda-boot-repair-to-float-rules: Adding garuda-boot-repair to float rules to ensure seamlessness between garuda tools
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garuda-hyprland-settings: rm copyQ and add cliphist
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garuda-hyprland-settings: comment epic mouse
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add new waybar themes
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add variable frame rates for better performance
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garuda-hyprland-settings: update previous theme and add new waybar theme
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garuda-hyprland-settings: rm timezone from waybar
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add new wallpapers by TilliDie
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add new login wallpaper and new wallpapers created add by TilliDie
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garuda-hyprland-settings: update keybindings
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add icons to mako notify
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garuda-hyprland-settings: make G-Hyprland an optional feature
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garuda-hyprland-settings: load an image before animated wallpaper to prevent crashing
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add variant for kb layout
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garuda-hyprland-settings: remove weather from waybar
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garuda-hyprland-settings: rm floorp add firedragon
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garuda-hyprland-settings: fix swww animated wallpaper changing glitch
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garuda-hyprland-settings: update garuda-locale.sh
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garuda-hyprland-settings: adjust monitor setting to default
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add garuda-welcome
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garuda-hyprland-settings: update mon.sh according to new implementation
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garuda-hyprland-settings: adjust foot font size for new implelementation
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add experimental gum implementation
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add waybar interval for custom-update
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add waybar-module-pacman-updates
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garuda-hyprland-settings: shortening the length of the network ads on waybar
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add unique autostart garuda-welcome
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update: update keyhints
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vim like keybindings: extra keybindings-hyprland-settings**: add swappy for SS
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add alt shortcuts to nwgbar
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garuda-hyprland-settings: new launcher icon waybar
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add screen width to waybar
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add information, ci checking commit message and remove PKGBUILD
Fix
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garuda-hyprland-settings: add execute garuda-local.sh, add only one time garuda-locale.sh
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garuda-hyprland-settings: automatically comment out monitor settings
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garuda-hyprland-settings: wofi crash if monitor scale factor ≠1
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update depedency for sweet theme
FireDragon is now based on Floorp
Another major change to one of our applications is the rebase of FireDragon to make use of the excellent Floorp as a base to build upon. Floorp can roughly be described as the Vivaldi of Firefox’s because it introduces a lot of customization options not present in any other fork. During a testing phase, in which a lot of community members participated, a lot of bugs could be ironed out. The official release of the new version already happened back in February. Things have been working very well since then. Thanks for all the feedback you people provided! Apart from being able to use Floorp’s feature set, the overall browsing experience feels much quicker than before thanks to some of the tweaks included.
Chaotic Repository Template/infra 4.0
While we announced the initial changes to our repository structure back in November 2023, a set of very cool new features was introduced lately. As some might have noticed, the package builds of the garuda
repository have been happening exclusively via our PKGBUILDs repository since the announcement of these changes. In the meantime, the CI setup and scripts were moved to the dedicated chaotic-repository-template and are working both via GitLab CI and GitHub Actions (with slightly different feature sets). The actual logic behind the build process and scheduling is handled by the Chaotic Manager. Those in tandem provide a pretty neat solution for efficiently managing Pacman Repositories. Repositories derived from the CI template will automatically sync any changes done to the base files, making it easy to maintain a handful of such repositories. While the scripts themselves were massively improved and behave much more efficiently than before, new features like automatic build order resolution, AUR package management, custom update hooks, on-demand/daily builds, insanely fancy logs, and the possibility of running local builds via the same code to debug builds got introduced. At the same time, the entire repo process is now more transparent to the public. Thanks to all these features, contributing is now easier than ever. The issues and merge request list are a lot more actively maintained and we hope it will help you make the changes you always wanted to make to Garuda Linux! See you at the repos!
Community wallpaper contest
Vote for our next release's artwork - (contest is now over) has concluded and selected the top three pieces of community art to be included in the Bird of Prey default wallpaper pack. The team felt the winner of the contest was of such high quality that it should indeed be selected as the default wallpaper for the Bird of Prey release.
So without further ado, the winner of the artwork contest and the honour of being selected as the default desktop wallpaper for the Bird of Prey release goes to @Mior_D_Miro and his piece titled Rave
Congratulations to @Mior_D_Miro and the two other contenders @mr_maniac_2k and @elite for being voted by the Garuda community as producing the top 3 pieces of artwork to be included in our new Bird of prey release. Additionally, all pieces are available in the new garuda-wallpapers-contest-2024
package
Other notable happenings
Other noteworthy changes are happening to different parts of Garuda Linux and/or infrastructure:
- Retirement of the Piped instance: the maintenance overhead introduced by having to rotate IPv6 addresses from our available /64 subnet proved as way too high to be able to reliably support this service. As our infra is close to 100% declarative, rotating IPv6 is a manual action that also requires a server reboot. This is why we leave this job to people with more fitting infrastructure setups. The instance will continue being up for a while so people can export their settings, if they want to.
- Linux-tkg kernels are no longer provided in the Chaotic-AUR repository
- The ISO images are now automatically verified during the boot process and will refuse to boot in case its broken.
- The Calamares slides were updated to have a more modern look and feel.
- The Garuda project became 4 years old!
- The Qtile edition has been dropped. Its maintainer @RohitSingh will need the time to focus on his work life, so we wish him good luck with his endeavours! All packages will stay around though, so existing setups continue functioning.
Looking for downloads?
We got you covered! Click on the DE name to download the respective ISO:
Lengthy release notes
These can be found in our changelogs repository starting with this release. Since we introduced conventional commit messages a while ago, we are now able to generate the changelogs mostly automated - which is also why they have a slightly different structure. Click me to read them!