[HN Gopher] Garuda Linux
___________________________________________________________________
Garuda Linux
Author : oriettaxx
Score : 127 points
Date : 2021-02-02 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (garudalinux.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (garudalinux.org)
| lxe wrote:
| Nice feature set! Usually I don't care for yet-another-distro,
| but I think these folks are prioritizing multimedia, gaming, and
| other "linux on the desktop" features that I don't see much of
| these days.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Looks like a new Antergos?
| folkrav wrote:
| Endeavour OS is Antergos' spiritual successor, AFAIK - OOTB you
| more or less get a vanilla Arch install w/ some minimal theming
| and configuration. Garuda looks more focused on giving you a
| fully configured Arch installed, including backups, heavy
| theming, using btrfs, a bunch of management GUI tooling, etc.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Antergos was completely broken (their installer did not work
| several times during the year because they did not properly
| test it) so let's hope it has a better reputation.
| eyeundersand wrote:
| Does anyone have info regarding their naming? Another commentator
| mentioned the bird in Hindu mythology but I'm curious why they
| chose that name. They also have a ||Shree|| at the top of their
| webpages.
| xinuc wrote:
| Garuda is the common name for Javan hawk-eagle [1], an
| Indonesian endemic bird. It's also Indonesian national emblem
| [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javan_hawk-eagle [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_emblem_of_Indonesia
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| It denotes speed and air-supremacy and it's mythical status
| makes it a well known symbol across South and S.E. Asia. (as
| well as Mongolia). Some of the core developers are Indians and
| Garuda is a local name for Eagle in many Indian languages.
| danans wrote:
| Linux has historically been associated with a penguin mascot,
| so seems like perhaps they pivoted to the local name of a
| different bird, the eagle, which is what Garuda literally
| translates to (in addition to being the name of the
| mythological king of the eagles).
|
| The ||Shree|| at the top is a religious symbol when presented
| in that way though, as a search for that term will easily
| demonstrate:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?safe=strict&rlz=1CAUSXU_enUS92...
|
| The only common non-religious context for that word is when it
| means "Mr." but for that it must precede a name. So I'm not
| sure why it's there if not as a religious symbol. It would be
| similar to having "God is great" or "Allahu 'Akbar" up there.
|
| Perhaps projecting their religious identity is important for
| the developers of this project.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > It would be similar to having "God is great" or "Allahu
| 'Akbar" up there.
|
| This is not true, / / shrii / / is not equivalent to
| "Allahu Akbar". It is commonly used term to denote a start of
| something, e.g. a notebook or a new project. I would say it
| falls in a gray area as it doesn't invoke any Indian deity
| and is pretty open to interpretation. It's functional
| equivalent in Indian Islamic tradition is 786.
| danans wrote:
| > I would say it falls in a gray area as it doesn't invoke
| any Indian deity and is pretty open to interpretation. It's
| functional equivalent in Indian Islamic tradition is 786.
|
| Just because it does not invoke a particular deity doesn't
| mean it is not religious, and specifically Hindu.
|
| Unlike many other Sanskrit phrases that can be interpreted
| in secular contexts, that one is quite specifically Hindu,
| especially of abstract Hinduism that is more a system of
| philosophy and political identity then an affinity for any
| particular deity of the Pantheon.
|
| That all said, it's hardly surprising given that Indian
| culture has long had a tendency to distinctly mark even the
| most mundane and non-religious aspects of life with
| religious symbolism, regardless of the religion. The
| Enlightenment arrived relatively late to India, and with it
| the secular and religious dualism that is more pronounced
| in the West, which is why you don't tend to see scientific
| or technical documentation in the West imbued with
| religious symbols.
| splintercell wrote:
| Just a mascot I presume
| pcdoodle wrote:
| I like the built in snapshots feature, good for linux noobs like
| myself. Any other distros have this feature in their OOBE?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| openSUSE also has this
| pr0zac wrote:
| I'm currently running Manjaro (also based on Arch) on my work
| laptop. It also has the snapshots feature. I had to use it
| recently when a kernel update broke my GPU and my external
| monitor stopped working. https://manjaro.org/
| gadders wrote:
| Let's hope it crashes less often than Garuda Airlines.
|
| (NB Yes they are supposed to have improved but 10-20 years ago
| they had a very bad reputation).
| happy-go-lucky wrote:
| Your comment is completely irrelevant and hence being downvoted
| into oblivion.
| gadders wrote:
| OH NOES! I am losing imaginary internet points!! I can lose a
| few more here as well.
|
| Your username is ironic.
| dubcanada wrote:
| What does this have to do with Garuda Airlines?
| gattilorenz wrote:
| It has the same first name. Which, incidentally, is a
| mythological bird creature (hence the logo) from Hindu
| mythology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garuda
| heyoni wrote:
| And both planes and operating systems can crash!
| nix23 wrote:
| Birds can crash too.
| brewdad wrote:
| All this talk of crashing and no car analogy?!
| Koshkin wrote:
| A car does not look like a bird.
| nix23 wrote:
| Nor does an OS...let alone an Airplane.
| nix23 wrote:
| Pontiac Firebird, they burn and crash allot ;)
| acd wrote:
| Nice with the Steam gaming and graphic design.
| gegtik wrote:
| What's the selling point of this distro, vs any other? I dont see
| it.
| jvzr wrote:
| AFAIK it comes built-in as a slightly customized Arch (using
| regular Arch repos, plus one of their own) with Btrfs as
| default FS, Pipewire as default sound system, and many Kernel
| patches oriented towards "performance". They have an edition
| more suited towards gaming, and also one with a very customized
| KDE desktop. It is very similar to Endeavour and Reborn,
| although with the aforementioned tweaks
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Apparently an optimised, rather 'riced' kernel for gaming
| setups. Default filesystem BTRFS with zstd compression,
| integrated with snapshotting and GRUB. So you can easily roll
| back from a botched upgrade, straight from GRUB. Which could be
| handy since it's based on Arch.
| stragies wrote:
| The default Garuda GRUB options disable all CPU/GPU level
| security patches against Meltdown, Spectre etc. by running
| with "mitigations=off". That is playing with fire for
| anything operating on data you'd consider non-public, imo.
| rndgermandude wrote:
| Is it really so much worse, outright playing with fire?
|
| There are only few things running untrusted code on a
| typical end-user system, most notably the browsers
| executing javascript. Now that would be attack-able. But
| then again, it seems unlikely that anybody would launch
| broadly deployed attacks, as the vast majority of systems
| would run with mitigations on, so it's just not worth the
| trouble considering that and considering that you also have
| to get lucky to actually extract something valuable (and
| recognize it is valuable). On top of that, browsers also
| bring a bunch of mitigations that make it harder to exploit
| these bugs even if system mitigations are disabled.
|
| I'm personally not very concerned about anybody trying to
| attack me with spectre/meltdown class bugs that can be and
| are usually mitigated, even with mitigations disabled on my
| system. If somebody wanted to attack me, either at random
| (broad attack), or targeting me specifically, they'd have
| far better ways and targets to try first than hoping I'd
| visit their website and run without mitigations enabled and
| have something valuable in my memory.
|
| This is different if it's a shared system, like cloud
| machines/shared hosting, where this is an class of bugs is
| far more of a concern. And if you know or have reason to
| suspect you're a specific target, then you might err on the
| side of caution as well.
| jonathonf wrote:
| There is an _option_ to do this, it is _not_ the default.
| stragies wrote:
| The screenshot in their picture gallery has it checked,
| so I assumed, that was the default setting
| jonathonf wrote:
| I guess the Garuda Boot Options screenshot shows the
| options in operation:
|
| https://garudalinux.org/images/garuda/ss/garuda-boot-
| options...
|
| I'm not sure whether this is misleading or not given the
| nature of illustrative screenshots, e.g. the package
| management one shows VLC installed but not Firefox:
|
| https://garudalinux.org/images/garuda/ss/pamac.png
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| A ddg site search of "cve" returns zero hits.
| VRay wrote:
| I don't get it, are you saying spectre/meltdown aren't
| dangerous?
| screamingninja wrote:
| https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5715
|
| https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5754
|
| https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-3639
|
| > A ddg site search of "cve" returns zero hits.
|
| What was your search query?
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| I think I expressed myself poorly, a search of the Garuda
| site has zero hits on the term cve.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| I noticed that, and said so in another post...
|
| edit: Think of cars on a racetrack. Street worthiness
| considered ballast...ROAAARRRR!
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| One of the special things about Garudas is that they are born
| flying. In other words, a flying Garuda adult typically gives
| birth to a baby Garuda mid-air, while flying, and the newborn
| already knows how to fly and flies on.
| pkulak wrote:
| Opinionated Arch flavor? Looks kinda cool since it lines up
| very closely with the decisions I make when I install Arch.
| [deleted]
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| Garuda is meant to fill the void between Arch Linux and Manjaro
| Linux. Trying to be closer to Arch by having only one extra
| repo than Arch linux compared to 3 repos (Stable, testing,
| unstable? ) in Manjaro. Some tools shown are of Manjaro origin.
| Like Pamac & Garuda Settings Manager.
|
| Context:
|
| I am hearing about Garuda Linux in Manjaro forum where I
| presume "the developer" talked about it in the "Other OS"
| discussion section. With the deteriorating community relations
| Manjaro has been having with their community and with some of
| the Manjaro folks like old time users/volunteers moving to
| Garuda because of it, Garuda Linux has a place and an
| opportunity at hand to outshine Manjaro. If they keep their
| community relationships in check I guess.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| What relations deterioration are yoi talking about? The big
| thing was a while ago now and I havent heard any new drama,
| what did I miss?
| bdefore wrote:
| I'm unaware of deteriorating community relations with
| Manjaro. Care to elaborate?
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't know the deets, but the founder did some stuff with
| funds (commingling with personal funds?) that people think
| was messed up. It's causing a lot of tension in the
| community.
|
| I hope they get through it. Manjaro is my goto for my
| Pinebook Pro.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Eww. The Manjaro arm64 kernel is hacked up and very far
| from vanilla/mainline Linux. A hot mess if I have ever
| seen one.
| freedomben wrote:
| Assuming what you're saying is true (I have no reason not
| to believe it), I do of course hope that gets corrected,
| but in the mean time I'm glad they at least got something
| to work. I tried quite a few other options before Manjaro
| and all of them had some kind of sharp edge.
|
| It may be that a hacked up kernel is what is needed right
| now to make it work well. I get 6x the battery life than
| I did before (seriously), and updates don't totally break
| my system. Two pretty nice features :-D
| Foxboron wrote:
| Manjaro is currently owned by "Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG". One
| or two (maybe three now) constributors are hired by this
| company to work on the distro.
|
| Because of this there is essentially two parts to Manjaro.
| Manjaro the Community and Manjaro the Company. Manjaro the
| Company has funds from HW deals with Pine, laptop vendors
| and merch.
|
| Manjaro the Community has community donations through
| opencollective. These funds are parts of the community
| funds Phil (founder of Manjaro the Company, and project
| leader) had collected privately and forwarded to this
| collective. These funds are used to pay for laptops and
| merch associated with business expenses to forward the
| interest of Manjaro the Company.
|
| You can see how this creates some tensions when the
| boundary between the Community and the Company is blurry at
| best.
|
| https://opencollective.com/manjaro/
|
| https://archived.forum.manjaro.org/t/change-of-treasurer-
| for...
| jonathonf wrote:
| > These funds are parts of the community funds Phil
| (founder of Manjaro the Company, and project leader) had
| collected privately and forwarded to this collective
|
| OpenCollective and CommunityBridge/LFX were set up after
| the surprise company announcement to collect community
| donations from that point (and intended to protect them
| as independent). The previous privately-collected
| donations were never forwarded.
| KabirKwatra wrote:
| I use Garuda Linux on my main machine, but there are some
| annoying bugs. I dont know if it's the theme or kde, but after a
| window has been open for a long time the window buttons don't
| show the colors. Theres also weird scaling with text in window
| borders and the titles in latte pick from arbitrary instances of
| the application.
| stragies wrote:
| Make sure, you properly backup your HOME-Dir, or make sure to
| not enable HiDPI. Garuda has a bug, where it deletes your Data
| if you go messing with the wrong appearance settings:
| https://forum.garudalinux.org/t/after-deactivate-hidpi-my-ho...
| jonathonf wrote:
| It doesn't make the original bug less severe, but it was
| resolved under an hour after it was reported.
| stragies wrote:
| Oh, good to know, thanks for replying!
|
| Makes you wonder about the underlying plumbing though, if
| setting an GUI appearance option can lead to data loss in
| the first place.
|
| Is there a writeup/summary somewhere that explains "the
| lessons learned"? Otherwise I'd kind-of start to worry
| about what could happen, if ... say ... I change the
| Bluetooth output codec, or some other other UI details.
| jonathonf wrote:
| > Is there a writeup/summary somewhere that explains "the
| lessons learned"?
|
| Not that I'm aware of, but I'm sure you could check the
| GitLab commits and/or ask on their forum if you're
| interested.
|
| This is a young project (just under a year old) with
| developers who do this for fun. The developers are going
| to keep making changes that maintain the fun they have
| during development.
|
| Mistakes will be made. Things will break. Lessons will be
| learned. This isn't a decades-old mature distro, so if
| you're expecting something absolutely bullet-proof then
| Garuda currently isn't it.
|
| However, I will say that the pace of improvement is
| pretty stunning. Their direction and what they have
| achieved in a short space of time is pretty impressive -
| not just within the distro itself but the surrounding OOB
| features and infrastructure like ChaoticAUR (prebuilt AUR
| packages), secure password management (Bitwarden),
| dotfile sync (NextCloud), a pastebin service for log
| output (Privatebin), ...
|
| Is it perfect? No. Is it for everyone? No. It is what it
| is, and doesn't try to be anything else, and I kind of
| like that approach.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| Have you tried posting an issue on their forums? New Linux
| Distros have a great amount of patience to users. And also the
| first class support in their own official forums.
| stopdistrobs wrote:
| What, oh what is this doing on HN? I'm sorry but we do not need
| to encourage people to spend their time making "distros" (aka,
| default packages and a theme), or promoting the use of such
| things.
|
| No security team, no discussion of what package set they use.
|
| Come on, this is cringe. _Their HIDPI functionality will delete
| your $HOME and their backup strategy doesn 't backup $HOME._
| https://forum.garudalinux.org/t/after-deactivate-hidpi-my-ho...
|
| I'm sorry, I don't mean to be overly dismissive but if _anyone_
| is spending more than 20 seconds considering ever running
| something like this, please get better at rapidly evaluating
| information.
| syoc wrote:
| I feel you are projecting a lot about why or how people would
| test this distro.
|
| Playing with something in a VM or on some laptop for a couple
| of hours for fun is perfectly fine. Even if you are playing
| with broken or "not good" software.
|
| Also, how polished should something you spend your free time on
| be before you allow the public to take a look? I have never not
| tried this distro myself and not read it's documentation. It
| might claim to do things it shouldn't.
| ketralnis wrote:
| Nobody's making you use it and calling somebody's work "cringe"
| is pretty rude
| alexwasserman wrote:
| I think a bug that causes loss of personal data when changing
| a display setting warrants a "cringe"-type flag. It's a
| pretty egregious bug to have.
|
| Nothing on their site says "This is not ready for daily use",
| but bugs that wipe out my home directory when touching
| common, and unrelated settings, definitely make me think this
| is a pre-alpha type project.
|
| Cringe might be a loaded term, but it's appropriate.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| It's just completely unproductive. I don't see an issue
| with pointing out the flaws in the distro, but calling it
| "cringe" does nothing to your comment besides devalue it.
| Why not use a descriptive word like "insecure"?
| mrozbarry wrote:
| I agree, but for different reasons. In comparison, the
| GoboLinux post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26002251
| ) links to the homepage that immediately tells me "this is what
| this distro does." In comparison, Garunda doesn't tell me this,
| all it does is prompt me to download it. Even their about page
| is "well, these people worked on it." I don't care who is
| responsible, I want to know why this exists, what problems it
| solves, etc. So then I go to their forum, and there's a pinned
| faq. Go there - still nothing, just more things prompting me to
| download their version. Get this out of here.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Did you even scroll? It's all there!
| mrozbarry wrote:
| Alright, you're correct, but it definitely shouldn't be a
| footnote. So I guess it's arch linux plus a few gui tools
| that other linux distros don't include by default, and
| maybe geared to gaming? I guess at this point, I'm confused
| why this isn't just a "configured arch" wiki to optimize
| for gaming, and maybe mention custom aur packages. I don't
| really understand repackaging arch linux, the whole point
| is to tinker and customize.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| For some that seems too troublesome. Shrinkwrapped
| convenience it is! Following your argument to the end,
| all distributions are superficial, since there is
| http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ and anything more than
| customised recipes in some wiki are just a useless waste
| of effort ;->
|
| edit: See also 'A Generation Lost in the Bazaar' by Poul-
| Henning Kamp https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
| mrozbarry wrote:
| I totally get your point, I'm not trying to be difficult,
| but I think your conclusion of my argument is much more
| extreme than what I'd recommend people to do with arch.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| It's O.K. I know I tend to be difficult, contrarian,
| whatnot else. At least sometimes, not always :)
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Maybe security isn't their focus? Just look at
| https://garudalinux.org/images/garuda/ss/garuda-boot-options...
|
| YOLO!1!!
| jonathonf wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26005872
| Kaze404 wrote:
| I've been using EndeavourOS ever since Antergos shut down and
| never had a single issue that I wouldn't have in other distros.
| Isn't the point of Linux that anyone can do whatever they want
| with it? If you think that's a bad thing, you might have a
| better experience with closed source operating systems.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| I was wondering "why" and then started scrolling down and the GUI
| around pamac and AUR is compelling, because AUR is THE best thing
| about Arch. I install 99%+ of my packages with an AUR helper
| (yay) because AUR is so well contributed too!
|
| The BTRFS by default seems compelling too!
| hnarn wrote:
| > BTRFS by default seems compelling
|
| I must have missed something, because every person I've ever
| heard talk about BTRFS has said something along the lines of "I
| would never use that in production". Is that view of BTRFS
| outdated?
|
| Last time I used it for example, I tried out compression only
| to realize that there's actually no command to see what
| compression ratio is being applied without installing what I
| interpreted as a third party tool (compsize).
| m463 wrote:
| I started wondering about BTRFS when I read this:
|
| _One thing I will not run is btrfs, aka ENOSPCfs. I saw it
| fail again, and again, and again, and again, AND AGAIN, and
| again, and again. Then I saw it fail some more. The promised
| features never materialized, and the drama and surprising
| behaviors never ceased. All costs, no benefits? I 'll leave
| that on the shelf, a few spots down from reiserfs (which was
| plenty sketchy BEFORE you know who did you know what)._
|
| https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/11/feedback/
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I've used BTRFS on my laptop for a while and it was working
| fine. In my use case, however, I ran into trouble because I
| was constantly near the edge of filling the file system so I
| very often needed to do rebalancing and other tricks to claim
| more free space. It was a bother, but it beat spending $150 I
| didn't have on a 512GB SSD at the time.
|
| For modern systems with normal use cases (i.e. not mine back
| then), I don't foresee a lot trouble. I went with encrypted
| ext4 because that was included in the installer during my
| reinstall, but I wouldn't change the settings if the
| installer had defaulted to BTRFS.
|
| There's a lot more tooling out there for debugging ext4, but
| honestly, I never really missed anything when I still used
| BTRFS. The lack of tools makes data recovery harder in case
| of a complete failure (always make backups, no matter what
| file system!) so I wouldn't use it in a production server,
| but for a desktop or laptop OS I don't really see the
| problem.
|
| Using Timeshift for snapshot management as a way to sort-of
| emulate Windows' system restore is kind of neat and got me
| interested in trying it out again next time I'm reinstalling
| Linux. Last time I didn't have the space for snapshots, but
| now I do and it solves a problem I've had before (quick and
| easy backups after modifying system config) with ext4-based
| installs.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I thought the appeal of Arch was that it's a bit like Gentoo
| without all the compiling? Why not use Gentoo if 99% of your
| stuff is AUR builds?
| fao_ wrote:
| The last time I tried to install gentoo the build system
| itself broke mid-install
| bachmeier wrote:
| AUR is separate from the main repositories. I don't think I
| ever compiled a package that was in the main repos. With
| Gentoo, you compile it all.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| What does this gui bring over the one in manjaro?
| Quot wrote:
| Pamac is the default GUI package manager for Manjaro, so
| there's nothing different with that.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| the contrast on most of the uis they show on the homepage is
| absolutely terrible, hope there are more themes
| jonathonf wrote:
| You can switch to whatever theme you want. The defaults are
| opinionated. If you like them, great. If not, use another
| distro. That's fine.
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(page generated 2021-02-02 23:02 UTC)