Garuda Linux 'Talon': Arch, but different, and better
Garuda Linux brings an important feature to the Arch world: snapshots and rollback.
Garuda Linux is an Arch derivative founded by Indian developer Shrinivas Vishnu Kumbhar, and named – as is the national airline of Indonesia – after the Hindu demigod who is the flying mount of Vishnu. Garuda is one of the newer distros we've looked at, founded in 2020.
We have recently looked at Arch Linux itself, and a couple of Garuda's other relatives – Manjaro Linux and EndeavourOS. Like its progenitor, Garuda is a rolling-release distro, but it periodically issues updated ISO images for installing new machines, so we took the new mid-July snapshot, codenamed "Talon", as a chance to take a look. We tried the Xfce version, but the selection of desktops is comprehensive: both a Mac-like tuned KDE edition, a KDE Lite version and a KDE-Git edition, plus GNOME, Cinnamon, LXQt, and MATE, and a choice of tiling window managers: Wayfire, Sway, i3WM, and Qtile.
Up front, Garuda has quite startling system requirements: it wants a full 30GB for its root partition, which is two or three times more than most distros ask. There is a good reason, though: Garuda formats the root partition with Btrfs, and uses the Snapper tool developed by SUSE.
