I think it should be considered. I love this distro but after the major garuda update ( when the garuda queen stuff came) of 2025 it works slowly. Fire dragon is too much buggy. So i removed it. But Firefox lags and freezes more as the time passes .
On my side it’s the opposite.
If you search the forum firedragon has had fixed upstream problems for a short time.
Post your garuda-inxi that we can check your hardware specifications and software.
BTW, you can install any kernel you like, there is no need for extra spins.
Same like themes.
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Have you verified what causes your slowdowns, or appears to? I would assume you already run a fairly lightweight DE/WM setup.
While it would likely be OK to replace Zen with Liquorix, Zen has most of what makes Liquorix an improved desktop and notebook kernel. But, nothing in any 6-series kernel, even plain old mainline LTS, should cause things like Firefox (or Firedragon) lagging. That kind of thing should either be a memory or storage issue. You might want to try seeing about tweaking Firefox’ memory settings, and make it GC more often. Keep top up, too, and see if the lagging coincides with swapd0 high CPU (hard to precisely diagnose and fix, but a clue), or ZSTD high CPU (fix: edit fstab).
You stated you are running Garuda with 4 GB of ram. This is the minimum that Garuda will run with, and unless you are running one of our lighter editions your system will likely never be very performant.
You can run Garuda with only the minimum specs, but using a Dragonized KDE version with such meager hardware would likely result in a very poor experience. You would need to de-tune KDE and remove most of Plasma’s eye candy for even half decent performance with such under an powered system.
You will obviously need to manage any browser’s memory usage extremely frugally with such minimal ram, or any system will inevitably bog down.
Garuda is primarily intended for modern systems, to take full advantage of all our performance enhancing optimizations. When it comes to running Garuda on antiquated hardware such as yours, as the old saying goes:
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
I’m not saying it’s impossible to make Garuda run well with only 4 GB of ram, but you will likely need to install one of our editions with a lower resource footprint. You also must be very competent at managing your system’s resource usage.
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For testing purposes, I installed Gardua Plasma Lite on an old ThinkPad T400 with 8 GB of RAM. Sure, with the old CPU it’s not a racing machine, but it runs smoothly. With only 4 GB of RAM, you just have to pay attention to what you’re doing and e.g. avoid having 10–20 browser tabs open at once. As has been mentioned, a more lightweight version of Garuda would be helpful.
Since you haven’t posted garuda-inxi, one can only speculate. Maybe it´s possible to give the system more RAM.
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