Introducing the Garuda Linux "Talon" upgrade
Hello fellow Garuda users! 
We hope all of you are alright, and feeling fine. Almost 5 months have passed since our last release. Therefore, it was high time for a new release! Of course, we're always focused on making Garuda the best it can be, but that doesn't mean we're changing the parts of Garuda that you already love! Let's have a look at what has changed since the beginning of the year.
Garuda-update or: one update tool to rule them all 
Since updating a rolling release Arch based distro can be quite confusing to newcomers, we have developed garuda-update to make this task easier. The garuda-update tool provides a neat little helper to automate many common update tasks. It automatically updates your mirrorlist, updates keyrings, applies various hotfixes and automatically resolves known common conflicts that may occur during an update. Due to its ability to update itself before the rest of the system, the latest fixes will always be applied accordingly. Using garuda-update in the terminal is now the recommended way of updating Garuda Linux.
BTRFS integration in Garuda 
In the last few months, the BTRFS Assistant has moved to its own GitLab org and has gained a lot of new features. Since the idea was to make it distro-agnostic, it no longer includes features like the "booted into snapshot" notification. In its place, the snapper-tools will be used to restore snapshots while booted into a snapshot. Although its feature set it still fairly basic (but being added to regularly), BTRFS Assistant is the go-to choice for advanced BTRFS management. Additionally, since we noticed that a lot of people didn't restore & reboot right away as intended, we also blocked Pacman transactions during such situations to ensure proper handling. Many thanks to @dalto for developing the BTRFS Assistant for Garuda and the rest of the Linux community!
Changes to our editions 
- The GNOME edition has finally gotten some needed love with @SonarMonkey recently joining our team and taking over Gnome's maintenance. Not only does this mean GNOME has finally gotten some issues like application theming on Wayland addressed, it also means other great things will be coming in the near future.
- The Cinnamon edition received touchpad gestures, has fixed the terminal profile icon, and dropped some obsolete packages.
- The Dr460nized edition now features Fira Code as the default monospaced font, and had its Latte layout updated. Additionally, it features a few new animations like KDE's new overview.
- MATE had its theming improved by changing the default fonts.
- i3wm had its config updated, and now features a clock and calendar.
- LxQT-Kwin received an overhaul.
- Wayfire has also gotten needed changes. It now uses customized PKGBUILDs to workaround the recent dependency issues that AUR packages exhibited.
- The BlackArch edition has been removed from our offerings. Instead we have provided the ability to add the BlackArch repo to Garuda via the setup-assistant.
- The Bspwm edition has been removed due to lack of maintainance.
- The KDE Barebones edition has also been removed, however we added two new KDE editions, (KDE Git & KDE Lite).
- The new replacement for the Barebones edition is the KDE Lite edition. This new edition is even lighter than our old minimal edition as it only contains free drivers in the ISO.
- The new KDE Git edition includes all the newest KDE
-gitpackages (built straight from master branch), which means that it contains all the latest and greatest KDE improvements and enhancements. This version is a cutting edge developmental edition, and as such bugs can be expected to be encountered.
Other changes worth mentioning 
The FireDragon browser recently received its own settings page thanks to efforts of the LibreWolf team. Here, the most important about:config values can be toggled easily, like anti-fingerprinting measures.
Returning: Garuda Cloud 
A few weeks ago, we announced the closure of Garuda Cloud. Now is the time to open it again as promised. Since we want to provide this opportunity to our fellow Garudians, only TL3/4 users (the trust level of Discourse) can requests an account at a dedicated thread. This is simply to prevent misuse and ghost accounts. We also need you to report if the account is no longer being required to offer opportunities to others instead. This time, we offer 1GB of storage space for you to use. If you are meeting the requirements and want to get an account, just send us a message
Donations status update 
You might remember we started setting up a way to donate to our beloved project in July of last year. It's incredible how much interest people showed in helping secure the future of Garuda. Up until now, we have collected roughly 3.300 € ! This helped in sustaining our domain costs and recently provided enough resources for a new root server at Hetzner. We have also set up, and will be maintaining an Arch Linux mirror in India. This is our way of giving back to Arch for all their hard work. The current funds on hand should be sufficient to sustain all current expenses for at least 3 years! Thank you all for your continued support, it means a lot to those working hard to provide you with a great distro! 
Infrastructure upgrades! 
Our infrastructure received major upgrades in the last few months - both configuration and hardware wise. For the first time, we used our funds to enhance our existing resources to rent a root server for our project, which means that a big part of our services is now hosted at Hetzner. Additionally, our server configuration has been overhauled - one change being that all tasks are now managed by Ansible. This has quite a few advantages! Not only does this allow us to open source our configurations, it also somewhat decreases the time spent configuring and updating servers. Furthermore, we can ensure the same settings and standards on every server. Thanks to a recent addition of @TNE , we are now able to easily bump pkgver's of packages instead of removing and rebuilding with the same pkgver. This will smooth out eventual issues with packages, which depended on an old shared library.
Meanwhile, our wiki got some new, handy updates like the GNOME cheatsheet.
There are also other, minor changes to a lot of places of the operating system like an increased, (more sane) faillock limit which can be found in the exhaustive changelog at the end of this post.
Some notable version updates:
- Linux-zen 5.17.4
- Plasma 5.24.4 / KF5 5.93
- GNOME 42.0
- LxQt 1.1.0
- FireDragon 99.0.1
- The usual upstream Arch updates
Have fun with the new release, cheers!
Downloads
- Dr460nized
- Dr460nized Gaming
- GNOME
- Cinnamon
- XFCE
- MATE
- LQXt-Kwin
- Sway
- Wayfire
- i3
- Qtile
- KDE Lite
- KDE-git
Upgrading your existing Garuda Linux installation
You can upgrade your existing Garuda Linux installation by running garuda-update in terminal. This applies all core system updates. Theme changes and package additions/removals will not be applied. Garuda Assistant's "reset config" feature can be used to apply theme changes.
And finally.. the usual exhaustive changelog
Edition changes:
- All editions:
- Fixed Alacritty configs
- Cinnamon:
- Add touchpad gestures
- Fix terminal profile & menu icon
- Improve Cinnamon menu
- Remove Conky Config
- Remove desktop effects
- Removed several obsolete packages
- Replace outdated background opacity setting
- Dr460nized:
- Add preview on hover
- Add Octopi notifier to autostart
- Fixed Latte layout & use the same top/dock for all screens (no more multi-monitor issues)
- Fixed wrong numlock value in SDDM conf
- Make overview effect default for top left screen edge
- Moved SDDM configuration to drop-in files
- Use Fira Code as new monospaced font
- GNOME:
- Changed backgroup path to fix wallpapers
- Reinclude chrome-gnome-shell
- Remove obsolete and "no schema found" dconf keys
- Using garuda-backgrounds package to suit GNOME requirements for wallpapers
- Welcome @SonarMonkey as new GNOME maintainer!
- i3wm:
- Added clock and calendar
- Updated config
- MATE:
- Improved theming
- Use Garuda-backgrounds as wallpaper package
- Use default fonts and default cursors for more consistency OOTB
- Qtile:
- Match the new default config for dunstrc while keeping customizations
- Sway:
- Removed swayfader from autostart
- Updated lockscreen image
- Wayfire:
- Fixed Sweet cursor
- Pulled multiple PKGBUILDs to our GitLab org to fix packaging issues
Application & settings changes:
- Beautyline icons:
- Fixed issues caused by import
- Import BeautyLine upstream changes
- Import new icons from Candy icons
- BTRFS Assistant:
- Moved to its own repository
- Really a lot of new features, complete code refactor
- Calamares:
- Updated version
- FireDragon:
- Added FireDragon settings page to toggle about:config values thanks to the Librewolf project
- Fix Firefox Accounts (also dropped ClearURLs due to this)
- Reworked firedragon.cfg based on newest Librewolf changes
- Several fixes to settings locks
- Updated addons
- Welcome back Searx as default search engine, Whoogle was getting ratelimited way too much
- Garuda-Assistant:
- Added new snapper-tools to depends
- Ask for root permissions only when necessary
- Fixed GDM Wayland toggle to not break things under X11
- Updated UI
- Garuda-libs:
- Added snapshot detector
- Garuda-common-settings:
- Added garuda-inxi command, enhances inxi with common useful information required when troubleshooting. This will be required when creating posts in the forum.
- Added systemd-oomd-defaults to dependencies
- Fixed visudo defaulting to vi as editor
- Garuda-fish-config:
- Added systemd unit to update fish completions (replaces garuda-update fish completions)
- Garuda-hooks:
- Reject Pacman transactions if running in a snapshot
- Garuda-wallpapers:
- Added several wallapers by tillidie & SGS
- Garuda-icons:
- Added pixmaps required for GNOME settings
- Garuda-migrations:
- Increased faillock limit to 10
- Set grub-overlayfs on existing systems
- Garuda-reduce-verbosity:
- Package to reduce verbosity of some actions, eg. sudo or pacman hooks
- Garuda-setup-assistant:
- Added applications to the development category
- Avoid pkexec if unneeded
- Prompt to install nonfree NVIDIA drivers if not installed (470 profits)
- Garuda-starship-prompt:
- Set battery.display comments to reflect settings
- Garuda-update:
- Added support for a config file to retain settings
- Automatically fix jack2 conflict
- Force LANG=C for auto-pacman
- Improved performance / verbosity
- Introduce auto-paceman via expect, handles several actions like resolving conflicts automatically
- Re-added AUR updating support via env variable UPDATE_AUR or CLI flag --aur
- Try to self-update after refreshing mirrorlist to profit from newest changes
- Updated looks to integrate better with the UI
- Garuda-wallpapers:
- Mhwd-db-garuda-git:
- Added 390xx IDs as dependency
- Dynamically generate Nvidia configs
- Move opencl and intel-compute-runtime to video-linux optdepends
- Removed xf86-video-intel as it was causing screen tearing issues and modesetting is preferred anyways
- Performance-tweaks:
- Replaced nohang with systemd-oomd, finally
- Pulseaudio-support:
- Added correct conflicts for Pipewire
- Snapper-support:
- Enabled grub-overlayfs mkinitcpio hook
- Snapper-tools:
- Mimics the UI of Timeshift while being able to restore snapshots
- New, highly opiniated Snapper tool
Server & infrastructure changes:
- Buildiso-docker:
- Use the full image for Podman compatibility
- Cryptpad:
- Deprecated and shutdown after 3 weeks notice. There weren't many people using it.
- Garuda Cloud:
- Cleaned and shutdown after 3 weeks notice. We will reintroduce it based on participation in the community rather than following the free for everyone path like the last time.
- Infrastructure:
- Major overhaul of the configurations (eg. moved away from Nginx Proxy Manager to use plain Nginx)
- New Ansible roles for all parts of the infrastructure
- Open sourced the server configuration for everyone to inspect
- Rented a new dedicated server for the project to provide additional opportunities like spinning up VMs for testing
- Startpage:
- Added IRC & Discord links
- Added new statuspages
- Wiki:
- Added GNOME cheatsheet
- Added multi-monitor setup manual for Dr460nized
- Added multitouch touchpad trackpad gestures article
- Updated installation & post-installation instructions
Notable version updates:
- Linux-zen 5.17.4
- Plasma 5.24.4 / KF5 5.93
- GNOME 42.0
- FireDragon 99.0.1
sad. and also when i start offtopicing here, i lose track of time too much 
)