JAdsel

As a tinkering old nerd who mainly runs Garuda these days, I would throw in that the added GUI tools don’t have to be in the way. It is Arch under the hood, and you can totally ignore Garuda’s add-ons and just proceed like you would on vanilla Arch whenever you feel like it.

Best of both worlds, really. The GUI tools are still there whenever you do want to use them, but it’s also just Arch. I like MX Linux for similar reasons, as someone who started out on Debian back in the day. Useful for solving problems in both cases, too.

Garuda is actually my daily driver these days, and I quite enjoy it. It does mostly just work, and I also like their desktop theming. The GUI installer is great for easy hardware detection and setup. But, that’s coming from a more experienced old tinkerer who was initially looking for some lazy troubleshooting with NVIDIA graphics on a new gaming laptop, and liked the distro enough to end up switching over.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend any rolling release to someone completely new to Linux. The devs have done a pretty good job at making some things more user friendly, but we are talking about Arch with some extra tools bolted on. You’d better be prepared for things to break occasionally, and to need to do some tinkering around under the hood.

On the plus side, you ARE dealing with Arch with all the info resources/user community built up around that, plus the Garuda community tends to be pretty helpful from what I’ve seen. You are going to periodically need to figure out how to fix stuff, however–and better to be aware of that going in. Some people are going to be more fine with the idea than others, but it is liable to provide a steeper learning curve for someone just getting started with Linux.

I ended up getting reevaluated for some reason in high school back in the '90s, by a complete pompous asshole. So, according to this dude, not preferring to sit at the front of a classroom is proof positive that it cannot possibly be ADHD. I must just be lazy and manipulative. (That second part was a new one, at least. Trying to dodge accountability? Idek.)

That was it, that was the entire rationale stated for why ADHD was supposedly no longer an issue in my life. I am not joking. Thankfully my parents thought he sounded full of it too, and did arrange for a more comprehensive educational reevaluation through a university center. Where my own seating preferences never came up, incidentally.

Yeah, I also had PTSD and actual (partly documented) reason not to trust some people behind me at that school. Turns out I’m also on the autistic spectrum. I still have not magically grown out of either thing, 30+ years later. Funny how that works.

That little anecdote aside, I do get the idea that this is probably one of those longterm received wisdom things. Just because it’s a go-to suggestion, doesn’t mean that this strategy is going to work best for everyone. Useful point to bring up, OP.

I came in just about as Debian Woody was coming out, in 2002. (Main reason I can even date it beyond “Idk, about 20 years ago?”).

Tried Mandrake a while after that, often recommended as pretty much the equivalent of Linux Mint at the time in terms of noob friendliness. I did enjoy that but stuck with Debian for my main system for years, though.

Very much agreed. I ran into some similar issues for a while on KDE Wayland, also with strange freezes–and was concerned that it might be a (fairly new at the time) hardware issue. No, it was evidently some weirdness involving the then-current NVIDIA drivers, which was thankfully fixed not that long after.

If you do have NVIDIA graphics, you’ll probably want to make sure it’s using the latest drivers from them–and maybe particularly on Wayland. More stable distros do tend to ship older versions.

Primarily Garuda these days. It’s basically Arch with some user-friendly additions. The major reason I tried it on a then-new gaming laptop was the actually really good IME hardware detection and minimal fuss NVIDIA setup using their latest drivers.

I was having enough headaches trying to get graphics actually working properly on the Debian-based distro I had been using, that I said fuck it and tried something that would hopefully get things working for me so that I could at least see that configuration to figure out where I’d been going wrong. Then I liked it enough that I have mostly just stayed there on this machine. (Did finally get things fixed on the other side, though.) But, I was already fine with Arch, which probably helps.

I still need to rack off another batch that’s taking up a good chunk of my brewing corner. But, the next batch planned for hopefully this weekend is a hoochy melomel concoction involving some frozen strawberries that need cleared out and compatible fruity-flavored black tea. (Kobbs Sörgårdste) It may also get some blackcurrant drink concentrate if that seems like a good idea flavorwise.

I was wanting to get a test batch of some Thai black rice and blueberry Franken-doburoku going, but the pressure cooker I’ve been using for glutinous rice has decided not to seal properly even after a gasket replacement. I don’t feel like messing around with steaming wholegrain rice on the stove, so that’ll just have to wait until I can troubleshoot and fix that/snag a second cooker. May need to wait for next month on that one.