I have a system where I triple boot. Arch Linux, Debian Sid, and Windows 10. Last time I booted into Arch, it was a tad broken, and it was on an old 2tb Spindle drive. So I decided with the release of Garuda Linux, I'd swap out that and copy over my home directory and check it out. I also installed the Dragonized KDE gaming version!

But about my setup; I have an i9-9660 processor, 980 GTX (swapped the 2080 into the VR Rig, as I can't seem to find a 3080 anywhere...), 64gb of ram, and 6 hard drives (two SSDs for Debian and Win10, 1 for Arch Linux, and 3 Data drives.).

Firstly, I was trying to install through a USB->SATA adapter to the new SSD (Samsung 860 EVO 2tb). It failed miserably on this system, the installer would hang at language detection!

So I took the new SSD and USB stick downstairs and installed it to the drive via a different computer (that only has one internal hard drive), then I moved it back upstairs to rsync over my /home dir from the Arch install onto the btrfs @/home partition. Not sure why it names them all that? There was @/ @/root, @/home... etc.

After that was done, it was time to swap hard drives and boot off the new one. Everything seemed to come up right, except for some reason the installer assigned my password to the Guest account and not to my real user's account, which I couldn't log into. So I rebooted to Debian, chrooted onto the Garuda partition, and fixed the password. Rebooted and logged in.

Next, I went o use the Garuda Setup assistant. This all worked fine earlier on the Gnome version I played with briefly in a VM. But here the updates all complained about libcurl not having rsync built into it (a problem with pacman's mirrorlist). Eventually the upgrades got to where it stopped complaining about that, but then somehow a bunch of things were broken. A lot of this, I believe is due to settings I had in my old /home dir. Like Steam wouldn't launch and needed to be launched from a terminal with --reset. Other things were kind of broken after this as well. Like I couldn't move an icon to the trash can, needed to restart KDE so new libraries were loaded. Rebooted again for this to work.

Next, after finally getting Steam working, there were a lot downloads, so I left that to do it's thing and started watching a show on Amazon Prime while checking other updates and installing some stuff. Some things needed to be re-installed, as the setup-assistant had removed them, I'm guessing due to some dependencies missing. And I'm still running into random things where the dependencies aren't there.

Unfortunately while I was messing with this, Latte (the new KDE Dock?) started freezing on me, and Firefox would freeze the video playback, while the audio still ran. It was terrible and happened several times. Anytime I'd try to mouse over the dock at the bottom, it'd freeze up. I rebooted again this morning and it seems to be more stable.

Conclusion so far: Probably should have just taken the list of cool features from Garuda, and installed Arch by hand again. Or maybe just keeping the BTRFS setup, and throwing Arch on that. I'll try the Dragonized KDE for a month or so, see if it does stay stable.

Note: Kmail still seems like the performance is terrible compared to Evolution. Need to figure out what's up with that!