Hello! My name’s Justin, though I more commonly go by “TheJustinMannRL” on the internet. I just moved to Linux earlier this week after wanting to 100% commit to moving and I have not had any regrets so far (though to be fair it’s been like 5 days tops). I’m 22 and have worked at an IT Service Desk (but not Tech Shop), but have built my PC and have generally always been able to fix issues with it by scouring the internet for a few hours.
I decided I wanted to move to Linux as I realized that Windows 11 was going to shizzle and I was just going to keep my laptop on Windows and find replacement apps that would suit my needs. I wanted an Arch-based distro that had some protections from me bricking my system; I had previously fooled around with EndeavourOS but did not find it super impressive. After looking around, I was considering CachyOS because of the optimizations, or Nobara as it was more gaming focused and had the CachyOS optimizations, but ended up choosing Garuda as it came up while I was searching. I find it a bit poetic that I chose Garuda, as I am a big FFXIV player and Garuda is one of the well known bosses in the game (though I know in general it is a bird god and the boss is based on it).
I am honestly surprised with how performant this seems to be as compared to Windows. To be fair, I am on all AMD hardware so I imagine that’s a big reason it’s playing nicely, but even on games I’d played on Windows, the games seem to be running a hell of a lot smoother, or at least at higher FPS. The RAM usage was a bit of a concern but then I realized it’s using 9 gigs only under load, where as Windows was taking up 9 gigs by default (and also I have 64GB of RAM so it doesn’t matter).
So far my favorite thing about the distro is Rani - having all of the maintenance streamlined into a single application is neat, and makes it easy to run updates and clear caches quickly (though to be fair I could also just type the command into the console). I also like the wobbly windows but I think that’s available on other DEs.
Thanks for having me, I will be back when I inevitably brick my system.
