Hello everyone! I've been using Garuda for about 2 months, but I haven't made a forum account since I was busy having too much fun learning and configuring things and I kept thinking that soon enough I'm going to run into an issue that I can't solve and I'll make an account and ask for help when that time comes. Well...it never came 
even though I tinker a lot with my system and I'm experimenting all the time. Garuda is very user-friendly, well-thought-out, and well-designed. I easily found solutions and answers to all my issues and questions from a quick search in the forums or the Arch wiki or the countless Linux resources out there. I thought I'd post to introduce myself since I know I'll be with Garuda for a long time and want to be part of the community, and to thank the devs and everyone for their hard work on creating and maintaining this beautiful distro.
I've been wanting to switch from Windows to Linux for probably 10 years, and I regret that I went for it only 3 months ago. I used to play a few PC games at a high level, sometimes for a job. What always kept me from switching was either lack of support for the game I focused on at the time or how the "anti-cheat" clients some of these games required (namely ESEA and Faceit) don't support Linux and don't plan to, which is sad. I also didn't want to leave and disappoint my friends/teammates that I played with.
I took a break from gaming and computer in general to deal with some real-life and health issues. Coming back a year later, I was done with competitive gaming. I was more interested in game development and learning more about everything in my system at a deeper level with the goal of optimizing for latency, responsiveness, and best overall online gaming performance...things I've always been studying but could never put enough time into. While setting up my system one day, I used GRUB to mod my BIOS to change some settings that were hidden, remembering simpler times when corporations and game companies didn't put spyware and rootkits on our PC's and manufacturers didn't take away as much control from customers over hardware they paid for. Then I suddenly realized I didn't have a reason to use Windows anymore...so I immediately started reading up on Linux and popular distros (my knowledge was very outdated), then I tried a few before I decided I want to run Arch, since I thought I'd learn the most about Linux at a low and more transparent level. It installed successfully on my first attempt, wasn't difficult as people were saying online. However, I soon realized that it isn't really for me... I was learning, but it wasn't always enjoyable, and I needed something more stable and more newb-friendly since I only have one machine and I would need it for school, so I searched for Arch-based distros and that's how I found Garuda. I went for a light and performance-oriented option as always so I picked Xfce and I loved it, everything from the installer to the way things are setup. I ended up breaking it badly eventually and successfully restored from a snapshot but I thought it's a good time to try something else so I installed KDE dr460nized and I loved it even more. KDE was lighter and much more customizable than I expected. Garuda provided me with a fully functional well-set-up system that allowed me to learn about Linux what I wanted whenever I wanted and at my own pace, while stress-free knowing snapshots are there and worst case, having my important files backed up, it only takes a few minutes to wipe/reinstall everything and have a functional system again. I've learned a lot in this short time and the more I learn, the more I understand and appreciate the decisions the devs make with Garuda. The experience has always been enjoyable, so thank you for that.
