I have whined and had problems and posted urgent sounding help requests in my confusion.
But, in reflection and in general, the opinionated Garuda/Hyprland distro has been a way different and better experience than my previous attempts with Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
I was persuaded I needed to try Arch if I wanted to really understand why and how Linux. But it felt super intimidating.
As a Mac user, the GUIs for Ubuntu and Mint just sucked… and Hyprland was really the only thing I saw that looked refreshing. I give zero shits about KDE & GMOME. But, trying to set up Hyprland with Arch looked intimidating, and seemed a huge rabbit hole that could only lead to pain.
I originally wanted to run Garuda/Hyprland off an external high-speed drive. It for some reason took over my whole machine. After a moment of worrying I lost some stuff, whatever.
I did have to fix a bunch of random errors, largely due to syntax differences between your out of the box hypr config files and whatever new syntax they want in their hypr config files.
But after that, it’s been smooth sailing in otherwise choppy waters with rogue waves.
This may not sound strange to you… but actually my computer is WAY more performant. I bought some latest and fully featured System76 machine about a year ago. And on Ubuntu and Mint all kinds of things just felt SLOW. For no reason. And, my CPU, memory use were just all over the place. My fans were schizophrenic. Now, on the Garuda/Hyprland install my machine feels blazing fast at every step, and my fans are sane.
To be honest, your performance problems may have been less about Ubuntu or Mint but about which desktop environment or window manager you’ve been using over there. All pure tiling mangers (i3, Sway and Hyprland) took less resources than KDE|Plasma, Gnome, XFCE or Mate when I used them. (Yes, I had all of them for some time)
As a 15 year mac user, I have been frustrated that the sizing and resolution of different apps on different screens is just super glitchy. This is across all the linux distros I have tried.
Sometimes it looks perfect, but then I open another app and for some reason the fonts and buttons are either super tiny or super large.
I have had to mess around with “dotfiles” – the files in the .config folder from the home directory in quite a few rabbit holes. Sometimes, I could fix it on a per-app basis.
Garuda won’t have control over this. It’s just a result of the chaos of the Linux ecosystem.
I recently switched from Ubuntu to Garuda/Hyprland specifically to have a less glitchy GUI but it’s probably more glitchy. More awesome, more powerful, but also just glitchy.
Blurry, beautiful design
Perfect for users who like to tinker
A good choice for those who like to try new things Might be unstable Requires some knowledge to troubleshoot issues
Would really like to thank you for hijacking the OP’s thread, not. Now before insting we get back on topic. You get the SAME issue with font and program window size in Windows as well. Depend more time than not on the particular program and or the particular monitor and the monitor needing to be adjusted in one’s system settings.
It’s still mental health awareness month, let’s all take a moment to appreciate all the fans in our lives who have struggled and kept going! I’m glad yours are stable now
Its nice knowing Garuda/Hyprland is bringing a lot more people to the beauty of hyprland.