After running Garuda Linux on my personal laptop for a couple of weeks, I decided to move to Garuda Linux on my two work machines too. After ~20 years of Debian, I now run Garuda on my desktop computer and two laptops and am so far very satisfied.
The whole distribution oozes of quality and attention to detail.
No flatpaks or snaps
Everything is in the Arch repositories. I really love this.
From just one source, I get all the proprietary apps I use, including:
- Slack
- Signal
- Intellij IDEA
- Spotify
- Google Chrome
As well as the latest and greatest of open source software that I care about:
- Firefox
- Emacs
- kdenlive
I love the fact I can install and upgrade all packages using the operating system's default package manager.
Flatpaks and snaps work, but it's always an extra pain, e.g.: - Mouse cursor theme doesn't work across apps - Apps don't have access to all user directories on the host machine - When re-configuring firewall rules, I must restart the snap sub system, which again restarts the snaps.
Pretty
The GRUB boot menu is pretty. The boot progress screen is pretty. The login screen and the default KDE desktop is ... gorgeous. The fonts, the colours, the hues, the wallpapers, the icon set. Everything is consistent and good looking.