Endeavour OS is Antergos' spiritual successor, AFAIK - OOTB you more or less get a vanilla Arch install w/ some minimal theming and configuration. Garuda looks more focused on giving you a fully configured Arch installed, including backups, heavy theming, using btrfs, a bunch of management GUI tooling, etc.
Antergos was completely broken (their installer did not work several times during the year because they did not properly test it) so let's hope it has a better reputation.
It has the same first name. Which, incidentally, is a mythological bird creature (hence the logo) from Hindu mythology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garuda
AFAIK it comes built-in as a slightly customized Arch (using regular Arch repos, plus one of their own) with Btrfs as default FS, Pipewire as default sound system, and many Kernel patches oriented towards "performance". They have an edition more suited towards gaming, and also one with a very customized KDE desktop. It is very similar to Endeavour and Reborn, although with the aforementioned tweaks
Apparently an optimised, rather 'riced' kernel for gaming setups. Default filesystem BTRFS with zstd compression, integrated with snapshotting and GRUB. So you can easily roll back from a botched upgrade, straight from GRUB. Which could be handy since it's based on Arch.
The default Garuda GRUB options disable all CPU/GPU level security patches against Meltdown, Spectre etc. by running with "mitigations=off". That is playing with fire for anything operating on data you'd consider non-public, imo.
I'm not sure whether this is misleading or not given the nature of illustrative screenshots, e.g. the package management one shows VLC installed but not Firefox:
Is it really so much worse, outright playing with fire?
There are only few things running untrusted code on a typical end-user system, most notably the browsers executing javascript. Now that would be attack-able. But then again, it seems unlikely that anybody would launch broadly deployed attacks, as the vast majority of systems would run with mitigations on, so it's just not worth the trouble considering that and considering that you also have to get lucky to actually extract something valuable (and recognize it is valuable). On top of that, browsers also bring a bunch of mitigations that make it harder to exploit these bugs even if system mitigations are disabled.
I'm personally not very concerned about anybody trying to attack me with spectre/meltdown class bugs that can be and are usually mitigated, even with mitigations disabled on my system. If somebody wanted to attack me, either at random (broad attack), or targeting me specifically, they'd have far better ways and targets to try first than hoping I'd visit their website and run without mitigations enabled and have something valuable in my memory.
This is different if it's a shared system, like cloud machines/shared hosting, where this is an class of bugs is far more of a concern. And if you know or have reason to suspect you're a specific target, then you might err on the side of caution as well.
Garuda is meant to fill the void between Arch Linux and Manjaro Linux. Trying to be closer to Arch by having only one extra repo than Arch linux compared to 3 repos (Stable, testing, unstable? ) in Manjaro. Some tools shown are of Manjaro origin. Like Pamac & Garuda Settings Manager.
Context:
I am hearing about Garuda Linux in Manjaro forum where I presume "the developer" talked about it in the "Other OS" discussion section. With the deteriorating community relations Manjaro has been having with their community and with some of the Manjaro folks like old time users/volunteers moving to Garuda because of it, Garuda Linux has a place and an opportunity at hand to outshine Manjaro. If they keep their community relationships in check I guess.
I don't know the deets, but the founder did some stuff with funds (commingling with personal funds?) that people think was messed up. It's causing a lot of tension in the community.
I hope they get through it. Manjaro is my goto for my Pinebook Pro.
Assuming what you're saying is true (I have no reason not to believe it), I do of course hope that gets corrected, but in the mean time I'm glad they at least got something to work. I tried quite a few other options before Manjaro and all of them had some kind of sharp edge.
It may be that a hacked up kernel is what is needed right now to make it work well. I get 6x the battery life than I did before (seriously), and updates don't totally break my system. Two pretty nice features :-D
Manjaro is currently owned by "Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG". One or two (maybe three now) constributors are hired by this company to work on the distro.
Because of this there is essentially two parts to Manjaro. Manjaro the Community and Manjaro the Company. Manjaro the Company has funds from HW deals with Pine, laptop vendors and merch.
Manjaro the Community has community donations through opencollective. These funds are parts of the community funds Phil (founder of Manjaro the Company, and project leader) had collected privately and forwarded to this collective. These funds are used to pay for laptops and merch associated with business expenses to forward the interest of Manjaro the Company.
You can see how this creates some tensions when the boundary between the Community and the Company is blurry at best.
> These funds are parts of the community funds Phil (founder of Manjaro the Company, and project leader) had collected privately and forwarded to this collective
OpenCollective and CommunityBridge/LFX were set up after the surprise company announcement to collect community donations from that point (and intended to protect them as independent). The previous privately-collected donations were never forwarded.
Thanks for this explanation. I've got a few devices happily yay'ing for a couple years now and hadn't realized the background.
I don't mean to dismiss the tension or that jonathon has made an unfair stand, but I am not sure I understand how the schism is warranted. Any software that combines outside funding with donations has a risk of this right? Unless I'm missing something it may just be a personal falling out.
>Any software that combines outside funding with donations has a risk of this right? Unless I'm missing something it may just be a personal falling out.
The problem is the intransparency in the way things where handled as well. This is the most recent event. There are more quarrels with FreeOffice Manjaro originally planned to pre-install for some reason, but later backpedaled after pushback.
One of the special things about Garudas is that they are born flying. In other words, a flying Garuda adult typically gives birth to a baby Garuda mid-air, while flying, and the newborn already knows how to fly and flies on.
What, oh what is this doing on HN? I'm sorry but we do not need to encourage people
to spend their time making "distros" (aka, default packages and a theme), or promoting the use of such things.
No security team, no discussion of what package set they use.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be overly dismissive but if anyone is spending more than 20 seconds considering ever running something like this, please get better at rapidly evaluating information.
I feel you are projecting a lot about why or how people would test this distro.
Playing with something in a VM or on some laptop for a couple of hours for fun is perfectly fine. Even if you are playing with broken or "not good" software.
Also, how polished should something you spend your free time on be before you allow the public to take a look? I have never not tried this distro myself and not read it's documentation. It might claim to do things it shouldn't.
I think a bug that causes loss of personal data when changing a display setting warrants a "cringe"-type flag. It's a pretty egregious bug to have.
Nothing on their site says "This is not ready for daily use", but bugs that wipe out my home directory when touching common, and unrelated settings, definitely make me think this is a pre-alpha type project.
Cringe might be a loaded term, but it's appropriate.
It's just completely unproductive. I don't see an issue with pointing out the flaws in the distro, but calling it "cringe" does nothing to your comment besides devalue it. Why not use a descriptive word like "insecure"?
I agree, but for different reasons. In comparison, the GoboLinux post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26002251 ) links to the homepage that immediately tells me "this is what this distro does." In comparison, Garunda doesn't tell me this, all it does is prompt me to download it. Even their about page is "well, these people worked on it." I don't care who is responsible, I want to know why this exists, what problems it solves, etc. So then I go to their forum, and there's a pinned faq. Go there - still nothing, just more things prompting me to download their version. Get this out of here.
Alright, you're correct, but it definitely shouldn't be a footnote. So I guess it's arch linux plus a few gui tools that other linux distros don't include by default, and maybe geared to gaming? I guess at this point, I'm confused why this isn't just a "configured arch" wiki to optimize for gaming, and maybe mention custom aur packages. I don't really understand repackaging arch linux, the whole point is to tinker and customize.
For some that seems too troublesome. Shrinkwrapped convenience it is! Following your argument to the end, all distributions are superficial, since there is http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ and anything more than customised recipes in some wiki are just a useless waste of effort ;->
I totally get your point, I'm not trying to be difficult, but I think your conclusion of my argument is much more extreme than what I'd recommend people to do with arch.
I've been using EndeavourOS ever since Antergos shut down and never had a single issue that I wouldn't have in other distros. Isn't the point of Linux that anyone can do whatever they want with it? If you think that's a bad thing, you might have a better experience with closed source operating systems.
I'm currently running Manjaro (also based on Arch) on my work laptop. It also has the snapshots feature. I had to use it recently when a kernel update broke my GPU and my external monitor stopped working.
https://manjaro.org/
Does anyone have info regarding their naming? Another commentator mentioned the bird in Hindu mythology but I'm curious why they chose that name. They also have a ||Shree|| at the top of their webpages.
It denotes speed and air-supremacy and it's mythical status makes it a well known symbol across South and S.E. Asia. (as well as Mongolia). Some of the core developers are Indians and Garuda is a local name for Eagle in many Indian languages.
Linux has historically been associated with a penguin mascot, so seems like perhaps they pivoted to the local name of a different bird, the eagle, which is what Garuda literally translates to (in addition to being the name of the mythological king of the eagles).
The ||Shree|| at the top is a religious symbol when presented in that way though, as a search for that term will easily demonstrate:
The only common non-religious context for that word is when it means "Mr." but for that it must precede a name. So I'm not sure why it's there if not as a religious symbol. It would be similar to having "God is great" or "Allahu 'Akbar" up there.
Perhaps projecting their religious identity is important for the developers of this project.
> It would be similar to having "God is great" or "Allahu 'Akbar" up there.
This is not true, ।।श्री।। is not equivalent to "Allahu Akbar". It is commonly used term to denote a start of something, e.g. a notebook or a new project. I would say it falls in a gray area as it doesn't invoke any Indian deity and is pretty open to interpretation. It's functional equivalent in Indian Islamic tradition is 786.
> I would say it falls in a gray area as it doesn't invoke any Indian deity and is pretty open to interpretation. It's functional equivalent in Indian Islamic tradition is 786.
Just because it does not invoke a particular deity doesn't mean it is not religious, and specifically Hindu.
Unlike many other Sanskrit phrases that can be interpreted in secular contexts, that one is quite specifically Hindu, especially of abstract Hinduism that is more a system of philosophy and political identity then an affinity for any particular deity of the Pantheon.
That all said, it's hardly surprising given that Indian culture has long had a tendency to distinctly mark even the most mundane and non-religious aspects of life with religious symbolism, regardless of the religion. The Enlightenment arrived relatively late to India, and with it the secular and religious dualism that is more pronounced in the West, which is why you don't tend to see scientific or technical documentation in the West imbued with religious symbols.
Thank you for the response. I'm from Nepal, so I know what a Garuda is and what Shree means. Another commenter also mentioned the connection with Indonesia but you're probably aware that it is the vahan (mount) of the lord Vishnu himself, so it is quite ubiquitous. I had not, for some reason, made the connection with the linux penguin and it makes a lot of sense in that context. Thanks!
Regarding the other discussion on 786 and Shree, I agree with you. The closest parallel to Allah hu Akbar I can think of would perhaps be something like Aum Namaha Shivaya, but not really.
> The closest parallel to Allah hu Akbar I can think of would perhaps be something like Aum Namaha Shivaya, but not really.
Maybe something like Jaya Bhagavaan. Of course the amazing thing (to me) about Hinduism is the tendency towards non standardization, and the sheer diversity of symbolism despite the attempts to simplify it down to a single religious identity.
Yes. Jaya Bhagwaan would be a lot closer, however I can't recall having heard it in any setting. It's usually Jay Shambho or Jay Shree Krishna and such, which are perhaps equivalents, although non-monotheism in the Sanatani Dharma prevents an exact analog to allah hu akbar, imo.
Fair point about the non-standardization. Read somewhere that the Sanatani corpus/philosophy is the Linux of religions, which I thought was quite apt. Namaste.
I use Garuda Linux on my main machine, but there are some annoying bugs. I dont know if it's the theme or kde, but after a window has been open for a long time the window buttons don't show the colors. Theres also weird scaling with text in window borders and the titles in latte pick from arbitrary instances of the application.
Have you tried posting an issue on their forums? New Linux Distros have a great amount of patience to users. And also the first class support in their own official forums.
Makes you wonder about the underlying plumbing though, if setting an GUI appearance option can lead to data loss in the first place.
Is there a writeup/summary somewhere that explains "the lessons learned"? Otherwise I'd kind-of start to worry about what could happen, if ... say ... I change the Bluetooth output codec, or some other other UI details.
> Is there a writeup/summary somewhere that explains "the lessons learned"?
Not that I'm aware of, but I'm sure you could check the GitLab commits and/or ask on their forum if you're interested.
This is a young project (just under a year old) with developers who do this for fun. The developers are going to keep making changes that maintain the fun they have during development.
Mistakes will be made. Things will break. Lessons will be learned. This isn't a decades-old mature distro, so if you're expecting something absolutely bullet-proof then Garuda currently isn't it.
However, I will say that the pace of improvement is pretty stunning. Their direction and what they have achieved in a short space of time is pretty impressive - not just within the distro itself but the surrounding OOB features and infrastructure like ChaoticAUR (prebuilt AUR packages), secure password management (Bitwarden), dotfile sync (NextCloud), a pastebin service for log output (Privatebin), ...
Is it perfect? No. Is it for everyone? No. It is what it is, and doesn't try to be anything else, and I kind of like that approach.
All fine and well, but then the Webpage should perhaps tone down a bit on the flashy images, and perhaps mention more prominently, that this iron is still glowing hot on the forge, and basically a tinkering environment for the time being.
I was wondering "why" and then started scrolling down and the GUI around pamac and AUR is compelling, because AUR is THE best thing about Arch. I install 99%+ of my packages with an AUR helper (yay) because AUR is so well contributed too!
Odd. Used it for years and it's never let me down. It's way more stable than Arch which will definitely break if you're not careful as everything is bleeding edge.
I've used arch for about 9 years and have only really had it break on me for a reason that was a) shitty hardware or b) a pre-planned breakage that was alerted to and a solution given via the news page. Maybe some other minor cases of breakage but all had solutions in say, the Arch Wiki. Never has the build system itself crapped out on me, though
I must have missed something, because every person I've ever heard talk about BTRFS has said something along the lines of "I would never use that in production". Is that view of BTRFS outdated?
Last time I used it for example, I tried out compression only to realize that there's actually no command to see what compression ratio is being applied without installing what I interpreted as a third party tool (compsize).
One thing I will not run is btrfs, aka ENOSPCfs. I saw it fail again, and again, and again, and again, AND AGAIN, and again, and again. Then I saw it fail some more. The promised features never materialized, and the drama and surprising behaviors never ceased. All costs, no benefits? I'll leave that on the shelf, a few spots down from reiserfs (which was plenty sketchy BEFORE you know who did you know what).
I've used BTRFS on my laptop for a while and it was working fine. In my use case, however, I ran into trouble because I was constantly near the edge of filling the file system so I very often needed to do rebalancing and other tricks to claim more free space. It was a bother, but it beat spending $150 I didn't have on a 512GB SSD at the time.
For modern systems with normal use cases (i.e. not mine back then), I don't foresee a lot trouble. I went with encrypted ext4 because that was included in the installer during my reinstall, but I wouldn't change the settings if the installer had defaulted to BTRFS.
There's a lot more tooling out there for debugging ext4, but honestly, I never really missed anything when I still used BTRFS. The lack of tools makes data recovery harder in case of a complete failure (always make backups, no matter what file system!) so I wouldn't use it in a production server, but for a desktop or laptop OS I don't really see the problem.
Using Timeshift for snapshot management as a way to sort-of emulate Windows' system restore is kind of neat and got me interested in trying it out again next time I'm reinstalling Linux. Last time I didn't have the space for snapshots, but now I do and it solves a problem I've had before (quick and easy backups after modifying system config) with ext4-based installs.
Nice feature set! Usually I don't care for yet-another-distro, but I think these folks are prioritizing multimedia, gaming, and other "linux on the desktop" features that I don't see much of these days.
I had been running Manjaro on an acer swift 3 but decided to try Garuda qtile this evening. The install had one hiccup near the end which looked like this:
I shut down the live USB stick, rebooted, and everything worked fine despite the error. I did the pamac update. Everything was quick including wifi and barrier worked on my existing win/mac/lin setup without fail installed from AUR.
Configured a few things on the desktop and everything I depend on worked out of the box, which is surprising given the Ryzen 4700U that requires a recent kernel to function well. This was 5.10 so good enough. Testing power functions as soon as I can find them.
Chuckle.
The default qtile config doesn't make power easy to find.
Happy so far though.
Terminal config is perfect out of the box.
I just needed to tweak the fonts a bit up for my aging eyes on the 1920x1080@14". Ouch!
Really enjoying Garuda with qtile for the turnkey tiling WM that's almost as good as manjaro i3 or Regolith if you like their Ubuntu build.
95 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] thread(NB Yes they are supposed to have improved but 10-20 years ago they had a very bad reputation).
Your username is ironic.
edit: Think of cars on a racetrack. Street worthiness considered ballast...ROAAARRRR!
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5754
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-3639
> A ddg site search of "cve" returns zero hits.
What was your search query?
https://garudalinux.org/images/garuda/ss/garuda-boot-options...
I'm not sure whether this is misleading or not given the nature of illustrative screenshots, e.g. the package management one shows VLC installed but not Firefox:
https://garudalinux.org/images/garuda/ss/pamac.png
There are only few things running untrusted code on a typical end-user system, most notably the browsers executing javascript. Now that would be attack-able. But then again, it seems unlikely that anybody would launch broadly deployed attacks, as the vast majority of systems would run with mitigations on, so it's just not worth the trouble considering that and considering that you also have to get lucky to actually extract something valuable (and recognize it is valuable). On top of that, browsers also bring a bunch of mitigations that make it harder to exploit these bugs even if system mitigations are disabled.
I'm personally not very concerned about anybody trying to attack me with spectre/meltdown class bugs that can be and are usually mitigated, even with mitigations disabled on my system. If somebody wanted to attack me, either at random (broad attack), or targeting me specifically, they'd have far better ways and targets to try first than hoping I'd visit their website and run without mitigations enabled and have something valuable in my memory.
This is different if it's a shared system, like cloud machines/shared hosting, where this is an class of bugs is far more of a concern. And if you know or have reason to suspect you're a specific target, then you might err on the side of caution as well.
These attacks are being done algorithmically, automatically now.
Seriously, I haven't seen any news of these attacks being used against end-user systems, either broadly or targeted. Have some links?
Context:
I am hearing about Garuda Linux in Manjaro forum where I presume "the developer" talked about it in the "Other OS" discussion section. With the deteriorating community relations Manjaro has been having with their community and with some of the Manjaro folks like old time users/volunteers moving to Garuda because of it, Garuda Linux has a place and an opportunity at hand to outshine Manjaro. If they keep their community relationships in check I guess.
I hope they get through it. Manjaro is my goto for my Pinebook Pro.
It may be that a hacked up kernel is what is needed right now to make it work well. I get 6x the battery life than I did before (seriously), and updates don't totally break my system. Two pretty nice features :-D
Because of this there is essentially two parts to Manjaro. Manjaro the Community and Manjaro the Company. Manjaro the Company has funds from HW deals with Pine, laptop vendors and merch.
Manjaro the Community has community donations through opencollective. These funds are parts of the community funds Phil (founder of Manjaro the Company, and project leader) had collected privately and forwarded to this collective. These funds are used to pay for laptops and merch associated with business expenses to forward the interest of Manjaro the Company.
You can see how this creates some tensions when the boundary between the Community and the Company is blurry at best.
https://opencollective.com/manjaro/
https://archived.forum.manjaro.org/t/change-of-treasurer-for...
OpenCollective and CommunityBridge/LFX were set up after the surprise company announcement to collect community donations from that point (and intended to protect them as independent). The previous privately-collected donations were never forwarded.
I don't mean to dismiss the tension or that jonathon has made an unfair stand, but I am not sure I understand how the schism is warranted. Any software that combines outside funding with donations has a risk of this right? Unless I'm missing something it may just be a personal falling out.
The problem is the intransparency in the way things where handled as well. This is the most recent event. There are more quarrels with FreeOffice Manjaro originally planned to pre-install for some reason, but later backpedaled after pushback.
No security team, no discussion of what package set they use.
Come on, this is cringe. Their HIDPI functionality will delete your $HOME and their backup strategy doesn't backup $HOME. https://forum.garudalinux.org/t/after-deactivate-hidpi-my-ho...
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be overly dismissive but if anyone is spending more than 20 seconds considering ever running something like this, please get better at rapidly evaluating information.
Playing with something in a VM or on some laptop for a couple of hours for fun is perfectly fine. Even if you are playing with broken or "not good" software.
Also, how polished should something you spend your free time on be before you allow the public to take a look? I have never not tried this distro myself and not read it's documentation. It might claim to do things it shouldn't.
Nothing on their site says "This is not ready for daily use", but bugs that wipe out my home directory when touching common, and unrelated settings, definitely make me think this is a pre-alpha type project.
Cringe might be a loaded term, but it's appropriate.
edit: See also 'A Generation Lost in the Bazaar' by Poul-Henning Kamp https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
YOLO!1!!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javan_hawk-eagle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_emblem_of_Indonesia
The ||Shree|| at the top is a religious symbol when presented in that way though, as a search for that term will easily demonstrate:
https://www.google.com/search?safe=strict&rlz=1CAUSXU_enUS92...
The only common non-religious context for that word is when it means "Mr." but for that it must precede a name. So I'm not sure why it's there if not as a religious symbol. It would be similar to having "God is great" or "Allahu 'Akbar" up there.
Perhaps projecting their religious identity is important for the developers of this project.
This is not true, ।।श्री।। is not equivalent to "Allahu Akbar". It is commonly used term to denote a start of something, e.g. a notebook or a new project. I would say it falls in a gray area as it doesn't invoke any Indian deity and is pretty open to interpretation. It's functional equivalent in Indian Islamic tradition is 786.
Just because it does not invoke a particular deity doesn't mean it is not religious, and specifically Hindu.
Unlike many other Sanskrit phrases that can be interpreted in secular contexts, that one is quite specifically Hindu, especially of abstract Hinduism that is more a system of philosophy and political identity then an affinity for any particular deity of the Pantheon.
That all said, it's hardly surprising given that Indian culture has long had a tendency to distinctly mark even the most mundane and non-religious aspects of life with religious symbolism, regardless of the religion. The Enlightenment arrived relatively late to India, and with it the secular and religious dualism that is more pronounced in the West, which is why you don't tend to see scientific or technical documentation in the West imbued with religious symbols.
Regarding the other discussion on 786 and Shree, I agree with you. The closest parallel to Allah hu Akbar I can think of would perhaps be something like Aum Namaha Shivaya, but not really.
Maybe something like Jaya Bhagavaan. Of course the amazing thing (to me) about Hinduism is the tendency towards non standardization, and the sheer diversity of symbolism despite the attempts to simplify it down to a single religious identity.
Fair point about the non-standardization. Read somewhere that the Sanatani corpus/philosophy is the Linux of religions, which I thought was quite apt. Namaste.
Makes you wonder about the underlying plumbing though, if setting an GUI appearance option can lead to data loss in the first place.
Is there a writeup/summary somewhere that explains "the lessons learned"? Otherwise I'd kind-of start to worry about what could happen, if ... say ... I change the Bluetooth output codec, or some other other UI details.
Not that I'm aware of, but I'm sure you could check the GitLab commits and/or ask on their forum if you're interested.
This is a young project (just under a year old) with developers who do this for fun. The developers are going to keep making changes that maintain the fun they have during development.
Mistakes will be made. Things will break. Lessons will be learned. This isn't a decades-old mature distro, so if you're expecting something absolutely bullet-proof then Garuda currently isn't it.
However, I will say that the pace of improvement is pretty stunning. Their direction and what they have achieved in a short space of time is pretty impressive - not just within the distro itself but the surrounding OOB features and infrastructure like ChaoticAUR (prebuilt AUR packages), secure password management (Bitwarden), dotfile sync (NextCloud), a pastebin service for log output (Privatebin), ...
Is it perfect? No. Is it for everyone? No. It is what it is, and doesn't try to be anything else, and I kind of like that approach.
The BTRFS by default seems compelling too!
I must have missed something, because every person I've ever heard talk about BTRFS has said something along the lines of "I would never use that in production". Is that view of BTRFS outdated?
Last time I used it for example, I tried out compression only to realize that there's actually no command to see what compression ratio is being applied without installing what I interpreted as a third party tool (compsize).
One thing I will not run is btrfs, aka ENOSPCfs. I saw it fail again, and again, and again, and again, AND AGAIN, and again, and again. Then I saw it fail some more. The promised features never materialized, and the drama and surprising behaviors never ceased. All costs, no benefits? I'll leave that on the shelf, a few spots down from reiserfs (which was plenty sketchy BEFORE you know who did you know what).
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/11/feedback/
For modern systems with normal use cases (i.e. not mine back then), I don't foresee a lot trouble. I went with encrypted ext4 because that was included in the installer during my reinstall, but I wouldn't change the settings if the installer had defaulted to BTRFS.
There's a lot more tooling out there for debugging ext4, but honestly, I never really missed anything when I still used BTRFS. The lack of tools makes data recovery harder in case of a complete failure (always make backups, no matter what file system!) so I wouldn't use it in a production server, but for a desktop or laptop OS I don't really see the problem.
Using Timeshift for snapshot management as a way to sort-of emulate Windows' system restore is kind of neat and got me interested in trying it out again next time I'm reinstalling Linux. Last time I didn't have the space for snapshots, but now I do and it solves a problem I've had before (quick and easy backups after modifying system config) with ext4-based installs.
https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=garuda+linux+qtile+install...
I shut down the live USB stick, rebooted, and everything worked fine despite the error. I did the pamac update. Everything was quick including wifi and barrier worked on my existing win/mac/lin setup without fail installed from AUR.
Configured a few things on the desktop and everything I depend on worked out of the box, which is surprising given the Ryzen 4700U that requires a recent kernel to function well. This was 5.10 so good enough. Testing power functions as soon as I can find them.
Chuckle.
The default qtile config doesn't make power easy to find.
Happy so far though.
Terminal config is perfect out of the box.
I just needed to tweak the fonts a bit up for my aging eyes on the 1920x1080@14". Ouch!
Really enjoying Garuda with qtile for the turnkey tiling WM that's almost as good as manjaro i3 or Regolith if you like their Ubuntu build.
Not quite there yet - but close.