So for about the last two weeks I've been looking a good Linux distro to move to. I'm fairly new to Linux, although I have installed a couple distros in my time. I never quite made the commitment to leave windows entirely, though. Until recently.
Started with Ubuntu, but while Ubuntu felt good, something about the giant Amazon app in the Ubuntu repository list held above all the others makes me feel a bit uneasy about the platform. Plus apparently there's been... controversies with some decisions Cannonical has made surround privacy. Thus, I began looking elsewhere. I intended to anyway, but this sped things up by a good month or two.
I went to SparkyLinux. I installed their GameOver edition. Too many apps, to many decisions made for me, so I switched to their minimalGUI, and decorated the room myself. As of yet, the minimal install (and further customization) of SparkyLinux has been the easiest install, to include Garuda. That may be because I worked out the quirks instilling Ubuntu, both are Debain. Ended up with LXQt desktop. Intended on keeping that setup into the unknown future.
Then I found Garuda. Yes, I'm interested in using as little ram as possible. But that assumes the extra ram used is used unintelligently. Think of ram as money. I don't like spending money. But if you can convince me I get something valuable out of spending that money, I might just spend it. I believe Garuda does that (with ram). But, it's the attempt at user accessibility that interested me particularly. The more people who use Linux, the more software developers target it, the less money Microsoft and Apple get. Heck, if the Pinephone or Librem get more traction, it may even hit Google. So, I guess you could classify my interest in Linux as a zealous blood feud against silicone valley. I do plenty of gaming as well.
Now, into specifics. I'm coming from Debain. That means I had to play some pacman where I was previously using apt. That was an adjustment. I had things break about twice to the point I needed to reinstall, likely due to me installing and uninstalling various non-compatable xscreensaver, libreoffice, and brave-browser packages. I did this with a combination of pacman, yay, and built-in GUI app manager installs / reinstalls / uninstalls. The most frustrating was one issue where I could simply not get my mirrors set up. The built-in mirror updater (reflector or something) would tell me no mirrors could be found. I eventually, AFTER A REINSTALL, I visited Arch Linux - Pacman Mirrorlist Generator, got the mirror list, manually deleted the #'s before every mirror under USA, and forcibly overwrote /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist. I then ran the automatic mirror updater, haven't had an issue since. Why on earth a fresh reinstall didn't resolve the issue, I don't know. But it didn't. I should also mention, when I first saw the option to save the mirrorlist in Garuda's automatic mirror updater (Setup Assistant, the button labeled "Save to /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist), I thought this was just saving a report of what the app did. It's not. It's completing the update, and newbies (like me) may not get that initially.
Another issue I've had is that the Brave browser, when switching profiles, opens the new profile... on a new virtual desktop. The problem with this is that I have no clue how to switch virtual desktops at start. In sparky, mouse-wheel did this. Eventually, after much duckduckgo-ing, I found the option to switch desktops by moving my cursor to the edge of the screen.
Do what you want with this feedback, although I'm hoping it's used to make Garuda more accessible to people even less tech savvy than myself.
