Got Garuda?

My interest in Linux began in my early teens, at that time my father worked for a telecommunication company and he would occasionally bring home CDs of legacy Novell software. I would always wonder what it was an how it worked but never understood it. My interest in computers peaked during primary school, some of my school friends would occasionally speak of WINE and Linux and how Windows programs could run on system without Windows. Sounded amazing but back then it was very primitive and compatibility was limited. By the time I reached high school the popularity of Linux also rose. Occasionally I would hear keywords of Linux among friends about Tiny Core, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian and the more pretentious would mention Backtrack and Kali Linux. I played around with Tiny Core, DSL, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and SliTaz. At that point it never stuck to me. By the time I could afford my first full PC build (my current system) I had no choice but to run Windows 10. I’ve always had issues with W10, slow boot times, constant icon cache corruption, windows updates getting stuck. I would always break my installation in pursuit of making it faster and more privacy-friendly using tools and replacing all the proprietary software with open-source ones. When Windows 11 was announced it gave me some hope but was crushed when the high requirements was released. So like a serf I signed up for the Insider Preview and eventually got the green light. Spend sometime using W11 but quickly realized that I hated the changes and requirements between W11 and W10. Stuck with a choice between two evils. Having realized that I have already replaced all of my daily driver software with open-source ones, the only thing that I haven’t replaced is my OS. So I started the search for freedom and found it at number 9 on this article: https://fossbytes.com/gaming-linux-distros-best/

This is when I discovered Garuda Linux, I saw that it was different, in it’s own class and immediately downloaded it and loaded it up in a VM. Played around a bit and managed to run Alien Shooter in Lutris. The best decision I’ve ever made was to remove W11 and load Garuda KDE Dr460nized Gaming Edition onto my system. Since then I moved from away from KDE, since I wasn’t a fan of this DE, to XFCE and eventually to Cinnamon. I’ve been running Garuda since May 2022 (maybe a little before then) with minimal to zero compatibility issues, probably a rare case I guess.