Why I am quitting Garuda - for a year or so

I consider myself an experienced Linux user (20+ years in private and corporate environments) and decided to try Garuda (Dr46onized) a couple of months ago. My emotional curve went from curious over impressed to enthusiastic and then to irritated to annoyed.

Let's start with the good stuff:

Look and feel - amazing
Garuda tools - very intuitive and great
Technical design choices - near genius (BTRFS with snapshots, ZRAM, optimizations ...)
Performance and responsiveness - very good

Now to the problematic part:

Every time, I perform a software update or install a new program, something breaks and requires either reverting to an earlier snapshot or reading through lots of Arch manuals. Eventually, everything can be solved but right now, instead of doing actual work, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why suddenly no sound card is detected, why windows have no headers or can't be closed, why alacritty suddenly stopped working, why suddenly video has sluggish playback, programs crash or dozens of other minor and major problems.

In all my years with Unix and Linux (quite a number of distributions), I have never managed to run into so many troubles as during the few months with Garuda. Now, even reverting to previously working snapshots, doesn't fix severe errors (despite me having done nothing more than regular updates).

I still consider Garuda to be a great project with a lot of future, but it's not for me at this point of time: I want to switch on my computer and know that everything is working and that it will be the next time I do so. This is what I always (since the late 90s) got with Suse, RedHat, Debian, Kubuntu ... unfortunately not with Garuda.

Good luck and fortune to you all and maybe I'll be around again in a year or so to give it another try.

Mina :cry:

5 Likes

Well, @Mina , I thought that you were comfortable with minor issues, because you are mod and TL3 at itsfoss community. But anyways, as you are going, I wish you good luck for future.

Good Bye :wave: :sleepy:

3 Likes

@Naman - I am in fact sad to leave because I see the great enthusiasm of the developers and also their kindness in this forum.

I really have no problems with minor issues, if they occur every other week or so, but right now, it has become just too time-consuming.

Good bye to you, too.

Hmm this means a rolling distribution isnt for you then

A fixed release distro is more suitable for you

4 Likes

You’re probably right, but until mid-February, I had no really problematic issues, so it seemed to me that the advantage of always having the latest features to try out outweighted the price of a little less stability. Everything depends on the measure.

A glass of wine every other day won’t hurt your health, every other hour is a different story.

3 Likes

i'm newbie, i installed Garuda KDE Dr460nized friday night. Your words makes me fear a little... I just need an affordable friend to make a really really simple computer usage, in the way grandparents could use a computer :wink: so i hope everything will be ok in everyday experience.
In my very short usage I think Garuda is crazy. ■■■■■■■ crazy. I can't think this thing is free, a huge huge work, the aesthetic is astonishing, everything makes looks other software as dinosaurs. i can't thanks enough Garuda Team for their work. I came from my personal computer iMac in 2006 and i'm on Mac right now (El Capitan, old, i know) in my job right now. In 2016 i bought a Dell Xps 13 (9350) developer ed., it shipped with ubuntu 14.04 (if i remember correctly) and life with Ubuntu&Dell was soooo complicated. Everyday was a day with problems. Little problems as for bluetooth, trackpad, global responsiveness, huge problems with screen suspension, kernel updates and other major stuff. Installed ElementaryOS, then came back to Ubuntu (16.??) then gone again with Elementary and finally Ubuntu. During last 2 years things goes very well but my Dell Xps was slow as carbon train, battery was down in a bit, responsiveness was not that good and Ubuntu is a little bit ugly and old if you look around some other OS. So i decided to look around because i was thinking about a easy and simple and fashion OS to do my basic things. I would not include MacOS in my list because they play a total different game but i looked at ChromeOS that is limited in doing some things but it has linux. I tried to install Neverware Cloudready because the USB stick was working very good but i'm not able to carry on complete installation. So i got Garuda a chance... i'm ■■■■■■ enthusiastic, it's the best thing that happened in my technological life since years. Everything is so smooth and perform exatly as it should be, i love it, I hope things will go good for ever... :wink:

2 Likes

@Fabtool
Please don't let my post discourage you. Garuda is, in my opinion, absolutely worth a try. My problems don't need to be yours: I have probably tinkered more in three months than you will in the next years.

Make your own experience and don't let others think for you!

thanks
"I have probably tinkered more in three months than you will in the next years" it's so true.. I suppose it when librewish said you're "mod and TL3" (that i can't even understand what does it means :grin: but i think that you're not dumb as i am :wink:).
I was just thinking if i should limit updates to major updates. Maybe this evening i surf in the system preferences... or maybe i should put my hands up from the keyboard...

1 Like

actually what i do is i do not update my system every day

i update it once a week or once a two week

it is rolling doesnt mean we have to keep up the pace
what we need to do is update it as per our need

if everything is working well update it after a week or two

and whenever you update you are on latest

just make sure to never do a partial update

if something breaks restore snapshot

if it works well then keep it

4 Likes

OK, this was the answer i hoped for. My fear was that if i jump an update or two i could get some confusion in the system when i finally proceed to the last update. All that Ubuntu stuff which i had to fight against in the years (Official Repository, Security Updates, Recommended updates, ecc. ecc.) makes me fear of my shadow... :smile:

1 Like

Sorry to see you go @Mina.

I hear what you are saying, but it also makes me wonder why you are experiencing such drastic issues (as I do not).

My suggestion would be to try one of the more stable versions of Garuda such as Xfce if your main concern is stability.

IMO this is kind of a fundamental issue of choice. If you want all the glitzy appearance of a Dragonized edition it will likely come at the cost of more maintenance. Very similar to if you want o drive a visually stunning high speed Ferrari tuned for performance it's likely going to spend a lot of time in the shop for maintence. That is generally the price you pay if you want to ride in style. If you wish otherwise, you buy a Toyota Tercel that has a bland appearance but has a reputation of great reliability as a daily driver.

I often post on the Garuda forum that there is a cost to using a rolling distro like Garuda. The cost is system tuning and regular maintence. I post this on a regular basis because this type of hands on maintenance is not for everyone. I'm retired, so I have plenty of time to research and troubleshoot any issues that arise on my system.

This is not a problem for myself. Quite the contrary, I enjoy the challenge of beating down bugs that may arise on my system. If this isn't for you, there's no shame in that. To each their own, and I hope you find a distro more in keeping with your needs.

I thank you for the polite and constructive manner you chose to frame your goodbye post. Generally most people that do this tend to post some rant about Garuda on the way out the door and that will usually receive very unwarm responses in return. Your post is a fine example of how if users feel compelled to write this type of exit post, the manner in which it should be framed.

Thank you for a thoughtful and well thought out post.

All the best to you, and hope to see you again in the future.

5 Likes

I would like to add that the exact opposite happened to me. I've not been on Linux long but I've distro hopped through all the arch based ones and my reason for leaving was the same as yours. I spent more time fixing the system than actually using it. Garuda has been working so well for me that honestly I can't believe it. An arch based system not throwing a fit every time I boot it up. I'm not saying it was completely flawless but I expect some amount of fidgeting on arch. Its part of the fun. And this distro delivers.

5 Likes

This is interesting because I agree with most of the points raised by the OP.

The good. All valid points.

The bad. Never had ANY problem with breakage. Never had to use snapshots. I daresay Garuda is more stable than Ubuntu or most ( though not all ) of its derivatives.

The ugly. Well, not ugly, just worse. Performance has gone steadily down over the last month or so. This has been discussed at length by the Devs. Mostly related to btrfs issues.

Overall, I'm happy with Garuda after almost 5 months of usage.

3 Likes

I learned to wait a week between updates and watch the Garuda Telegram to see if any people were pointing out any issues with updates before I update, and if something critical is being updated like the kernel or something, never skip rebooting immediately to be sure you don't need to fall back on a snapshot. I've only had issues where I've done multiple updates in a row and hadn't rebooted.

I've consistently seen the dev team jump all over what few things come up with updates so fast it would make a user of any other distro cry with envy. So as long as you pay a little attention, and note what is in the list to be updated, you can avoid broken installs or know about a manual intervention step you need to do before you even do your update.

I do understand where you are coming from @Mina , based on the times where I have had to deal with fixes as you described, but I haven't had one of those times once I got used to the methods I described above. Good luck to you in any case.

3 Likes

Everyone's experience is different. Last night, I officially installed Garuda Linux on my daily laptop. I pursued to update it after install,and it allowed me to use the newest version of all mirrors.

It took a while to update all mirrors and then update the entire system but wow, I am impressed with how stable Garuda is on my system.

I still have to get used to how apps are installed, because in Ubuntu Linux, apps can be downloaded and installed like you would in Windows. One thing I can say about Ubuntu, is that I frequently had boot issues. I had no issues on Garuda Linux, in fact it has been the most stable and full featured out of the box, compared to the other Linux Distros I have used.

I can do all my daily activities on Garuda. I can play some steam games, but not all, but I can always boot to Windows when I want to play the games I want.

+1

3 Likes

Interesting,
I update every day, literally every single day for the past 6 months.
Besides problems with the GPU due to wrong drivers , I don't recall any software package to be broke after an update.
Quite the opposite actually and I do use lot's of software for gaming, sharing and networking, office, virtualization, general work and all default software that comes along with Garuda, and everything is super stable and solid.
I actually moved from KDE Neon exactly because of sound problems similar to the ones the creator of the topic experienced on Garuda.

4 Likes

I'm having similar issues, too. First, a week ago, I rebooted after and update, and it went to the system recovery TTY. I couldn't even get TimeShift backups to work. After several days trying to figure it out, I gave up and reinstalled using the most recent ISO. Then I was able to restore almost everything from backups over the last couple of days. But again today, I ran an update and got the system recovery TTY. I was able to restore to a TimeShift back up today. (And I think the reason I couldn't before might be related to my fstab config, but it had been working just fine up until now...)
I consider myself on the lesser side of medium experienced Linux user - having run at least one Linux OS consistently for several years now, and have recently decided to make it my daily. Honestly there's so much I love about Garuda, but not being able to update for fear of a week's worth of guessing games and restoring from backups... I don't think my productivity can take such a hit. I actually enjoy a little bit of figuring it out, so a rolling release is fine. (I've got a laptop running Garuda KDE, and the Garuda config seems to be preventing Latte-Dock from loading. Not a dealbreaker. I'm working around it until I have time to figure it out and fix it.) And given all the GUI tools you guys have baked in, I'm assuming you are intending this OS for those of use less than Arch ninjas.
Nice to know I'm not alone.
Any ideas why it keeps breaking?

Welcome to Garuda.

Sorry to hear about your problems, but this is not a help thread.

See here for how to report issues:

5 Likes