#garuda linux

Gonna dual-boot my PCs because why not.

Bazzite? Garuda Linux? Cachy OS?

Or: It’s Not You. It’s Not Me. It’s Fucking Nvidia. AGAIN.

I had been eyeballing Garuda Linux for a while. I really dug the colorful, dragon-y aesthetic, I liked the idea of the Zen kernel and the gaming focus (gaming being one of the big reasons I bought the laptop I have in the first place), and I thought the automated snapshots were extremely clever. I’d been using Linux Mint as a daily driver for the better part of the year, and having used Ubuntu off-and-on in the past, I was a bit hesitant about leaving the Debian/*-buntu realm and heading into the shadowy depths of the Arch world, but the Live version of Garuda didn’t seem too intimidating. So I made a full backup of my Mint system just-in-case, and in November, I did a full install of Garuda Linux onto my laptop.

I loved Garuda. KDE Plasma constantly impressed me with how sleek and functional it was, and using it on the daily put it easily at my #1 Big Favorite Desktop Environment. I’m a tinkerer by nature and the auto-snapshot feature saved me many times when I managed to break something. The built-in tools helped me navigate some of the more unfamiliar parts of using an Arch-based distro, and the fact that you only had to type in one command to update the entire system made the near-daily updates barely noticeable. If not for one thing, I would definitely still be using Garuda.

The one thing, of course, is the Nvidia GPU in this laptop. The drivers kept breaking, and because gaming is one of the things I do the most, not being able to play games was a deal-breaker. Turns out the cutting-edge software often has bugs in it that make the Nvidia card unusable for days or weeks at a time. In the end, having a constantly half-functional system just wasn’t worth it. So I fired up that full backup and reinstalled Mint, to mend the broken GPU drivers with a slightly broken heart.

I don’t regret having used Garuda. I feel like I learned a lot, and it was interesting to spend time in a distro that was very different from my usual stomping grounds. And like I said, it has so many cool features that in a better world, I’d probably still be using it.

So what’s next? I think my next move is going to be switching to Linux Mint XFCE, and then installing KDE Plasma and removing XFCE. Going from Plasma to Cinnamon definitely feels like a downgrade at this point, and none of the other Ubuntu-based KDE distros fill me with great confidence. In the near future, I plan on installing more RAM on this laptop and replacing the SSD with a larger one as well. Not sure what order I’ll do these things in. Watch this space for more (eventually).

And as for Garuda, I guess there's only one thing to say:

My question for you is: Have you discovered any way to get Epic Games Store titles to run in Garuda? Lutris is failing to load EGS games when I click the Play button, but EGS is clearly trying to load it since I get a shader compilation window before everything just... goes blank.

I'd love your thoughts. I feel really close to being comfortable with just abandoning Windows for 90% of my work, but EGS titles are important for me to get working.

Oooh. I have to admit my entire PC gaming library is on Steam for this exact reason, I fear. I do wonder if compatibility software like Bottles or similar would help with this though...I haven't tried that yet 🧐 But you're on the same troubleshooting track I would be on. Of course now I'm finding that CatchyOS and Manjaro might be even better options for gamers since they're more widely supported...😅