

Since I REALLY wanted to just not be bothered with the issue of drivers (especially AMD drivers) I went for one of the “gaming” distros - Garuda Linux.
And I have to say, I’m very positively surprised. Judging by the images on their website, I was afraid it’ll be one of those, you know, “pro gamer, full RBG rainbow” bullshit designs, but no - it’s actually very pretty live, looks much better than on their website.
Runs on Arch (Zen?) and has a bunch of things that I like - for example an app called “Garuda Rani” which is basically: “you’re a noob, here, press these buttons to make things work”. It even includes installation shortcuts to some popular applications (Heroic Launcher, Steam, for gamers, but also Wine and Proton, AnyDesk, Discord, VLC, some emulators, a bunch of Linux games (they have SuperTux here!), etc.)
Overall, other than a slight issue with my favourite browser* and repositories**, everything so far seems to be smooth sailing.
* Created a profile, had it running, changed the hostname and it, apparently, screwed the browser over as it was looking for the profile on the old hostname. Weird stuff. Nuked the profile, recreated it, all is well.
** One of those “press these buttons to make things work” includes merging the mirrorlist. Since I knew nothing about it, I just merged one file to the other, didn’t think a second about it, and then when I tried installing Steam, I got an error about a “missing repository for extras”. Managed to fix it after finally reading what the #
signs mean in the mirrorlist file (everything was commented out - every single server…).
I’m pretty happy with the state of the OS and GUI as it is right now. Just moved a couple of things around, basically.
I do have a problem with Flathub, though - in theory, it’s great. But I’m going to be playing games on this PC and Flathub causes MASSIVE problems for Steam and Heroic Launcher, their libraries and Proton compatibility. Love the idea, don’t like the execution.
Garuda (or maybe it’s an Arch thing?) does a phenomenal thing with AppImage files - when I launched the first one it asked me if I want to add shortcuts to Application Laucher and tuck the AppImage away in a safe spot, so that it doesn’t sit in Downloads. LOVE that feature.