Just wanted to say thank you to the Dev team working on Garuda. I personally feel this is the best distro I have tried, and I'll be sticking here going forward. Finally no more distro hopping!!
I've done a ton of that lately, and thought I would give Garuda a run and see how it goes. And I'm so glad I did. Always had a preference to Arch based systems - although tried everything from Ubuntu, Fedora, opensuse, debian etc etc and this one takes the cake.
First impressions sold me. I love the theming with Dr460nized edition!! After a few teething issues with my AMD driver (realised I needed to go into hardware configuration and install video-linux) it's been an absolutely great time using it.
Just a few things I would love to see one day (but honestly not too fussed if it's not done) is:
Systemd-boot option for UEFI instead of GRUB (I use sbctl for secure boot which is a great tool when I use Arch - and it really only works on systemd) plus systemd-boot it's a lot more simple to manage and smaller footprint.
Option for Wayland or X11 at log in (I know this can be done manually, but for AMD users having that option from the start might be worthwhile - even though I prefer Xorg). I know the Garuda assistant does not seem to work correctly with Wayland so maybe a bit more emphasis on getting it all working nicely. Maybe if a user selects open source during install, it defaults to Wayland, and proprietary it defaults to Xorg? But obviously selectable at log in regardless.
A set up/install that downloads the latest and greatest when installing for the first time - rather than installing, logging in and then applying updates (I guess similar to archinstall) or even Ubuntu where connecting to the net fetches the latest patches. I know there is updated ISO's but still nice to keep everything up to date during install.
AppArmor built in and enabled out of the box (I do this immediately with all of my Arch systems - with auditing enabled and notifications on refused access).
Firewalld as default and enabled rather than UFW and disabled (just personal preference as it integrates with KDE much better).
Maybe have linux-video configuration in the post-install process, as well as hardware configuration (or detected and enabled automatically during install of Garuda) as it caught me off-guard originally when I got bad performance in Steam then realised I missed xf86-video-amdgpu provided with video-linux.
Anyway, just suggestions - and maybe some silly ones. Regardless I love the distro and again want to thank you for making Garuda what it is.
I am not a Garuda dev / mainatiner but here are my opinions:
Garuda by default uses BTRFS with Snapper and AFAIK you can’t setup snapshot booting with systemd-boot. Also managing bootloaders is already ugly, adding another bootloader will make things harder.
I am saying all these as a rEFInd + GRUB user.
This is really only 2 packages away, (for KDE) I can’t see why this couldn’t be done.
Makes sense but not easy to implement. I am also on EndeavourOS forums and have seen problems appearing when users opt for online install.
Quite difficult.
Where did you get the information that UFW is default and not firewalld? They both have install buttons on Garuda Assistant.
A firewall enabled by default is nice but I have no idea about the differences of these two.
Fair enough about online update. If it causes issues then fair enough.
AppArmor is literally a package and a kernel parameter? With auditing and notifications being two packages, an autostart desktop script and access to the audit group..?
I did not see firewalld anywhere tbh. I could be wrong, but I swear I only saw UFW in Garuda assistant installed with option to enable. I had to had to install the firewalld package and remove UFW. Then enable it with systemctl.
Again, I know these are all personal preferences which I did mention. So not expecting to see anything changed on my behalf. Was just feedback and suggestions as per the thread title.
Apologies for the profile pic. Thanks for fixing this up. Did not mean to cause any issues.
Oh and one last thing, can video-linux enable VRR for compatible displays? I swear 5.18 kernel added this by default but when I run 'grep VariableRefresh /car/log/Xorg.0.log' it shows disabled. So I had to create a 20-amdgpu.conf file. Was this meant to be enabled out of the box? As I have mostly been on Wayland KDE and never needed to create a conf file for it previously.
Ahh my apologies I didn't notice it before. Thought it was only UFW.
Thank you.
UPDATE: Thank you for the nice new shiny avatar! And I just wanted to end on a high note: thank you all for the amazing effort you put into this distro. The hard work really shows and I'm proud to show off my desktop. Happy to help donate when I can to help support the efforts.
Yeah @TNE quit being awesome and implementing all these new and unique features and scripts. I’m spending too much time looking through them all and using them haha
Now running Garuda on three systems... laptop daily driver, desktop daily driver, and a third unit that I run a VM as a TOR server. Had been (and still am on other machines) a Mint user, but have really come to enjoy Garuda and the reliability. Like Mint, it just works... on every machine I'm running. Thank you to the team for such a comfortable (and gorgeous) distro.
