My first impressions

My first impressions with both pros and cons. Hopefully this will help the devs improve the already superb distro.

Pros : Performance. The best performance I've experienced in any OS ( Linux or WinXP from the olden days). Amazing work with the kernel, the performance tweaks ( which I had already used in Manjaro thanks to the AUR package maintained by librewish ). But all the other tweaks and the kernel makes a huge difference even on my 7 year old ivybridge machine.
The 2nd pro is of course, Arch. One of my 2 most favourite distros along with vanilla Debian. Hopefully after using Garuda for a few months continuously, I can decide whether it should be added to that list. Been using it only for three days so it's too early to tell.

Cons: Nothing serious. A few niggling bugs/ glitches (even discounting the fact that it's a rolling distro. Love Arch and I can live with a few bugs ). Hopefully you guys can help me out with the rest if and when they become serious problems.

Cannot install any kernels from the Kernel Manager. It lists only one kernel which is currently installed and running. The generic 5.9 bmq kernel. I tried to install the ivybrige bmq kernel but there is conflict with the currently installed kernel ( which works great btw but I wanted to try a CPU optimized kernel for fun.)
The 2nd con isn't related to Garuda directly. More to do with Arch or rather Arch servers in India where I , like some of you, live. A slow server makes maintaining a rolling distro a slight problem. Nevertheless, I've been using Arch for about 2 years. The download speeds vary though, they're great sometimes. Other times barely 100 KB/s. Avg about 300 KB/s. I'm currently using German mirror which is faster than the Indian mirror. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
3rd and final con: Why in the name of all that is holy would you customize the Firefox settings? I like my Firefox plain to start with. Then I can customize it to my heart's desire.

Also, great Sweet theme for KDE. Looks amazing. :grinning:

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Welcome to the forums @subluminal :wave:

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That's not a bug with the kernel installation you can only install one version of tkg or bmq kernels that are closely related. Install another kernel from a different family then uninstall your current kernel, then install the kernel you want.

I guess the Firefox tweaks are justifiable as those unfamiliar with Linux aren't often up on configuring their browsers for privacy. It's more just a case of looking out for the uninformed.

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I understand, thanks for the prompt reply.

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For speed use maybe (ups, I over read in this long text :smiley: ) you use Germany, sorry.

alias upd='sudo reflector --country Germany --latest 5 --age 2 --fastest 5 --protocol https --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist && cat /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist && sudo pacman -Syu'

add country by ,France,Xxxx

and

:slight_smile:

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Did that already. Speed is slow-ish still. Need a faster mirror or a consistently and reliably faster mirror near my location. Till then, this will have to do.

sudo reflector --latest 20 --age 6 --protocol http,https --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

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You might want to have a look at either powerpill or pacman 6 alpha which supports multiple downloads at once :thinking:

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Any ideas when pacman 6 will enter Arch stable repo ?

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No idea. The alpha recently got showed off and has been working pretty well so far for me. If you dont like living on the edge there is still powerpill to look at which basically does the same thing, just as extra application :slight_smile:

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So is there any particular reason powerpill is not included by default while we wait for pacman 6?

Good question actually :thinking: I dont know how big the actual amount of users is which would need it, personally id call this bloat - but opinions vary of course :sweat_smile:

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