Fantastic work on the Garuda distribution. I love it! Congrats on being featured in "Linux for Everyone" that's how I found out about your telegram channel.
It's the best thing for linux noobs since Ubuntu ... and it's Arch! For years, I had tried Manjaro, but always had serious system instability issues. i've had some stability issues with Garuda, but along the way, i've learned so much about how everything works.
You have no idea how much Garuda (and the zen-kernel) improved the performance of my Macbook Pro laptops (late-2010 & summer 2013). On the old laptop, I went from being able to have like 5 tabs open in a browser to having 50+ with almost no performance degradation!
Wishlist:
A little more exposure on how the Garuda configuration/automation scripts work. If I could see a little more about what the buttons do in these menus, it would be like xray vision for system automation. One way to get this to work would be a button that activates a mode for the Garuda.
Perhaps a tool for understanding how the Garuda metapackages are structured, how redundancy and/or fault-tolerance is provided (e.g. to understand how various profiles of installed/enabled garuda-* packages contributes to system configuration & behavior). This could also be as simple as presenting the user with docs/links to the packages, but preferably something that helps point me to how these scripts/builds affect the system. In addition to building the social momentum & Garuda mindshare, this would be priceless for even new users, if it helped expose Garuda, Arch, KDE/etc configs & scripts.
perhaps a tool for managing the files backing the most recently versions of garuda-* packages via git submodules. When I am working on a app and I want to contribute to a lib I'm using, I add it as a submodule in the project. Then I can work on my own version of the project and it's easy to make commits. If something like this had a simple overlay tool (or perhaps some documentation establishing a workflow), then it could help grow social momentum behind contributions to this distribution.
A move away from Chaotic AUR (i'm sorry, but unsigned packages make me nervous as hell. As long as it's signed, there is a very high bar for modifying the binaries on the system).
A more interactive version of the Garuda boot manager. (on second thought, i believe this already exists. Kudos!)
Garuda Chroot on the system by default. Early on, distinguishing this from the Arch Chroot confused for me for a second.
A way to "diff" the config of my system versus the upstream defaults that Garuda ships out. There have been many things I have removed that Garuda ships by default, but I'm unsure of whether this was going to affect the stability of my system in the future. I'm sure that my system has reported some interesting usage information to the Garuda team. When I was first trying out Garuda, I was unsure of whether this "hypothetical instability via dissonance with future updates" was going to be a "deal-breaker" for me .... but AFAIK, nothing like that has happened (except maybe once or twice ... I'm a Linux noob so I donno)
Something to make dealing with grub issues a bit easier (or anticipating them on next boot). Garuda has things like this, but I swear everytime I install an Apple update for Mac OS, it breaks my grub. Sometimes on the second restart (after booting to Garuda once), although that may be more anecdotal than useful.
Not commenting on the rest of the post - but is it breaking grub - or just taking over? (so-called “boot coup”) If that is the problem, then there may be workarounds for it…
Tbh, I don’t think that rest of the requests need attention. Most of these problems will be solved when you spend some time with Linux…
True and there are likely much higher priority items. Half of the above are like an opinionated approach to workflow in Linux.
I just wish it was easier to learn where to find the right resources and to find out how to get involved with open source. Garuda has a ton of value to add just from the automation/configuration scripts that it provides. I’m a noob, but not exactly a beginner, and it’s mindblowing the kind of beginner-problems that can be avoided via these GUI tools.
Since switching to Garuda, I’ve actually stuck with Linux for once. I haven’t had an extra PC to learn on for the longest time and so I’ve only dabbled, which is something I deeply regret. I should have been using Linux like this for almost 20 years now … instead I’ve been dabbling. but it has been really challenging for me to retain a lot of what I learn. I would have saved so much time if I retained the bits/pieces from blogs & forum posts when doing the following for example:
fixing grub problems
querying w/ ls* commands like lsusb
doing dkms or modprobe stuff
customizing GUI & dotfiles.
Or if I simply knew why/how I should learn/use ‘first-principles’ approaches to Linux, systems/network design (cloud/devlops) and UI/UX are invaluable – but learning where to find the simplest approaches has taken me way too long. I’m talking about simple stuff like the Unix FHS file directory specification or Containerization of webapps with 12Factor or “systems/networks” as OOP-style objects/classes which simply pass messages smalltalk-style. Without exposure or a problem at hand, these are things that are avoided, since they may seem irrelevant, esoteric or needlessly opinionated, but they end up saving time – or better yet: eliminating problems before you encounter them. and if it’s a truly first-principles approach/paradigm for design, it’s especially good at avoiding problems. However, in Linux, if you simply know where to look under the hood, these patterns are everywhere and suddenly it’s easy to google (or man) directly for solutions … instead of problems.
I guess what I needed was a college Linux or operating systems class.
Well actually there is for most end users, since our packages reside there
Although one could, in theory just compile our packages from our GitLab and avoid Chaotic-AUR.
But no need - packages are signed and that claim is outright false
MacOS isn't interfering EFI or anything, since Apple is supposed to be cordoned off into its own APFS volume.
instead, when I boot from Grub after an update, the UUID's somehow change on my partitions, so that Grub/Linux try to load volumes that can't be found. I then go through a grub-install process, usually after chrooting, and this seems to fix it .... though the UUID's in Grub & on my system don't change.
it's kinda a boot-coup, i suppose. since nothing prevents Grub from loading, I don't believe it's related to a EFI priority issue -- like something that efibootmgr would fix. it sometimes happens (i think?) after I boot Garuda twice after running MacOS, with/without an update, but at that point it's so hard to keep track of. I don't believe that it happens every time I run MacOS ... but I can't precisely remember. I've had a lot of issues with Grub, but mostly from MacOS.
1 - As you can see, every package has a .sig counterpart, you can verify each file signature manually with GnuPG;
2 - If you take a look at man pacman.conf line 220 (section PACKAGE AND DATABASE SIGNATURE CHECKING) you see SigLevel supports only values that match {Never,Optional,Required} {TrustedOnly,TrustedAll}, so what you want is SigLevel = Required TrustOnly.
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