Linux distribution
Nate Drake seldom applies the words ‘luxurious’ or ‘sumptuous’ to an OS, but in Garuda’s case, he makes an exception.
T he Garuda is a large, mythical eagle that features in both Hindu and Buddhist mythology. The name seems fitting for this rolling Arch-based distro, given its rich plumage.
By this we mean Garuda’s flagship Dr460nized edition (code name Bird of Prey), which ships with Plasma 6. The developers have put their own spin on this, with neon icons and an awe-inspiring dragon-themed wallpaper. If this isn’t to your taste, Garuda offers 47 alternative backgrounds.
In the developers’ own words, this edition offers “a dark, blurry and fully immersive Plasma experience”. This dark theme is consistent throughout the system; even the OS’s custom Firefox-based FireDragon web browser comes with the dark reader extension.
Naturally, such visual splendour comes at a cost, which is why Garuda is also available as a KDE Lite version, which contains a bare minimum of packages to enable you to get started. There are also alternative spins incorporating Gnome, Cinnamon and Xfce.
We focused on the Dr460nized edition of Garuda, but there’s also a Gaming version, which is the flagship edition bundled with software like Steam and Lutris.
While we’re on the subject of pre-installed apps, the default edition takes some work to set up for daily use as there’s no bundled office suite or email software.
To this end, we fired up the 2.6GB ISO in live mode and launched the Pacman front-end Octopi from Garuda’s dock. This resulted in a database error, but the Garuda forums soon set us straight by saying we needed to run Garuda-update before proceeding. We were then able to install Thunderbird without issue.
On launching a third-party app for the first time, we saw what the developers describe as its “Mac-like” interface, as the icon appeared alongside others in the lower dock and was customised to match the theme.
The dock also contained a shortcut to the System Monitor, which we launched to see how heavy this custom version of Plasma 6 was on system resources. At rest, the system consumed around 1.5GB of RAM, while CPU usage hovered around 3%.
In fairness, the developers do warn against booting
