Aside - Garuda Linux

This post is by request - some folks in my life wanting a write-up on the Linux distribution I use, and why. So, I shall praise the benefits of Garuda Linux for a bit. It's based on Arch Linux, a fairly light-weight, extensively customizable distribution, and fits my needs for a daily driver well enough. Garuda serves my needs for both a productivity and entertainment platform, with various tools and applications available:

• Gaming
  • Steam for Linux - my preferred platform, and I would suggest using it as runtime even if you do not own games on it. The automated handling of Wine environments is an absolute killer application. HDR gaming is theoretically supported, but I have not had the motivation, time or inclination to make it work. Given how most of what I play these days, with the exception of Legend of Heroes, tends towards the highly abstracted strategy gaming, I have not needed the functionality. Not much call for eye candy in those games.
  • Heroic Game Launcher - Alternative client for Amazon Games, Epic Games and GoG. I mostly use it as front-end to download games from GoG and import them into Steam as external games - like I said, the integration there is so much better
  • Open source games - realistically, the works. I am partial to FreeCiv, but there's a lot out there.
• Productivity
  • LibreOffice - comprehensive MS Office replacement
  • GIMP - Raster image manipulation. The open source answer to Adobe Photoshop. Not being artistically inclined, I mostly use it for its advanced image scaling capabilities.
  • Inkscape - Vector graphics tool. Not something I personally use, but the requestor might be interested
  • TexLive distribution - Typesetting software. Primarily used for scientific literature, but has templates for all sorts of things.
  • VSCodium - Software development IDE.
• Communication
  • Clients for most of the common social and communications platforms
  • E-Mail: Wide selection of CLI and graphical clients. I use Thunderbird, despite its no-longer-so-recent enshittification - mostly because I haven't really found anything better yet. GMail and the various Microsoft cloud services pretty much killed that market.
  • Web browser: Chrome and derivatives, Firefox and derivatives, Webkit / Webengine based minors. I personally use Vivaldi (Chromium-based) as daily driver, with naked Chromium if I run into compatibility problems - Foundry VTT, I'm looking at you. This household is seeing bunches of misbehavior out of Firefox lately...
• Video editing
  • OBS - video capture and streaming platform
  • Numerous tools in that field, notably things like Blender
• Multimedia
  • VLC - all-in-one media player platform
  • Kodi - Entertainment hub

And more... I am fairly certain I only scratched the surface here. For me, it serves as management platform for my in-house network, development environemnt for assorted side/hobby projects, and gaming center.

Installation is simple enough - download the desired edition, write the image to a USB stick, and boot from it. A few caveats and notes here, however:

• Garuda, and more broadly, Arch Linux, do not natively play nice with Secure Boot. Probably easiest to disable that in the system firmware, There's a bunch of utilities to make it cooperate better, but that's out of scope here.
• I personally have a fondness for Ventoy to maintain a multi-boot thumbdrive with images for Arch Linux (bare), Garuda Linux, FreeBSD, Memtest86+ and a few others I find handy to have. Using Rufus might be easier if all you need is a one-shot USB stick to install a new OS.
• I would shy away from Dragonized Gaming - it contains an incredible amount of STUFF you may or may not need, and the visual design is bold. My personal preference is to start from something leaner and add what I need, rather than needing to figure out what all is present.
• I am a KDE guy. I would suggest using Mokka or Dragonized (non-gaming) as base install. Cosmic is promising, but alpha quality software, and I haven't experimented with it much.

System maintenance: I'm a command line guy, I admit it. My idea of installing a new package is

# paru -S <package name>

2025-12-13: Note that Paru is currently broken and awaiting a dependency update after an incompatible library change. This note will be erased once Paru cooperates again. In the interim, Yay is a drop-in replacement.

Garuda uses Octopi for graphical package / software management. Speaking entirely without judgment, the best I can say about it is "it exists, and seems to work" - this is not a condemnation, simply a recognition that I personally do not use it.