Garuda Linux 210101

Mayank Sharma has enjoyed one Arch-based distribution this month, but will lightning strike twice or has he been taken in by the distro’s tall claims?

- Mayank Sharma

IN BRIEF

Another entry on the growing list of distros based on Arch Linux, Garuda puts in a lot of effort to tame the rolling release distro and make it suitable for the average desktop user. It pays special attention to maximise performance, and to ship with attractive-looking desktops.

SPECS

Minimum

CPU: Any 64-bit CPU

Memory: 4GB

HDD: 30GB

Build: Separate 64-bit builds for the various desktops

Garuda Linux is a fairly new distribution that started out as a custom Manjaro build with several changes, such as performance enhancements.

The distro puts out over a dozen ISOs, each based on different desktops. The interesting thing is that all of them have been tweaked and customised to make them more inviting to first-time users. The first edition listed on the downloads page is KDE Dr460nized, which is a highly tweaked KDE edition that, according to the release notes of the latest release, is also one of the most popular editions.