So Manjaro and I have become really close after my time I spent with Pop!_OS (and I REALLY LOVE Pop!_OS, I just needed more from the relationship than Gnome could offer. Stellar OS for newcomers, though), and after installing it on four of my computers I was convinced that I had found The One. I’ve been happy with Manjaro for a few months now.
I have an old Lenovo Yoga 13 with the trackpad on the PS/2 bus instead of USB, and only a handful of distros support it OOTB, Manjaro being one of them. I was booting up distros one by one on my Ventoy flash drive to see what worked and what didn’t, and then I booted Garuda KDE and was impressed enough to go ahead and install it to see if it was anything special or just another Endeavour….
Less than 24 hours later and Garuda is now on my main laptop I use for work (Lenovo A475). The quality and attention to detail here is really head and shoulders above what I’ve seen in the desktop Linux space. The fact that I can simply type “update” and I watch it do the rest is just amazing.
I’ve never been a fan of dark-mode themes, but Garuda just feels…right. I thought that the neon icons would look juvenile and silly, but they really compliment the overall theme and look great, screenshots don’t do this DE justice. On a full HD or higher display, everything looks sharp and professional. Okay, I’m not in love with the window management buttons, but that was easily changed.
So congratulations to everyone who helped put Garuda together. Outstanding job.
