The first 2024 version of Garuda Linux, "Bird of Prey," has been released. With this update, we provide you the Dr460nized edition's Plasma 6 upgrade, as well as significant enhancements to Sway and Hyprland. FireDragon now offers a more customisable feature set after being rebased to Floorp. Along with the change to the garuda repository's build system, the pilot phase for Chaotic-AUR infra 4.0 is about to start.
Garuda Linux "Bird of Prey" (240428)
Hello, dear community! It is a pleasure to announce another release of Garuda Linux This release is named Bird of Prey and it is the first release of the year 2024. We planned to introduce this one much earlier - shortly after KDE 6 was released back in February - but due to real life keeping some of us busy and a nasty bug causing some machines to not boot up during testing, we needed a little extra time to get everything ready. Nevertheless, pushing the ISO release wasn’t necessary to have our old ISO still working thanks to Garuda System Maintenance being able to automatically migrate the newly installed systems to Plasma 6
The main focus of this release is certainly the already mentioned Plasma 6 upgrade which already arrived in the Dr460nized edition. Meanwhile, Sway and Hyprland received some major improvements to their respective editions as well. Also, FireDragon was rebased to Floorp, meaning we now profit from its interesting feature set. Lastly, our build system for the
garudarepository received major updates, and the pilot phase for Chaotic-AUR infra 4.0 is supposed to start soonDr460nized and KDE 6
As KDE 6 was released in February, the Dr460nized edition underwent some minor changes to how we create our desktop layout. Multiple plasmoids needed to be ported to KDE 6, which also caused some of them to be replaced with updated forks (eg. the original Latte dock window-{title, appmenu, buttons} are no longer maintained and were ported or forked by other people). Before the initial release of KDE 6 in Archlinux repositories, a lot of community members participated in testing the configurations via the dedicated
chaotic-aur-kderepository (building master branch packages). Meanwhile, our Garuda System Maintenance tool got updated with the ability to migrate KDE 5 Dr460nized editions to KDE 6. As soon as KDE 6 was released in Arch’s repos, the migration was automatically triggered for everyone using non-customized Dr460nized themes, also linking to our Wiki article to provide information for everyone who didn’t keep up to date with those ongoings. The overall appearance stayed pretty much the same apart from some aspects like the system tray, which now uses the current theme’s icons instead of hardcoded ones. Other KDE 6 goodies like a much improved (and now default!) Wayland session, partial HDR support, and enhanced touchpad gestures can all be attributed to the great work of the KDE developers. They have done a great job and many of the bugs present in the first release version were fixed very quickly. There was also an actively discussed announcement in our forum, in which many members participated.Sway
Sway underwent some nice changes as well! We took a closer look at some of the major changes in this topic back in February. This will be the first release featuring these changes in the main ISO on the downloads page.
The Greetd greeter has been changed to ReGreet for a simple, clean login experience. SwayFX has been added to enhance the visual effects of the desktop. Waybar has been reworked to update the appearance and add funtionality, and nwg-drawer has received a facelift as well. The screenshot tool has been changed to Swappy and the clipboard manager has been changed to Cliphist, with new bindings for both. Speaking of bindings, the cheat sheet has been completely overhauled to help new users get their bearings. New to this release, the default terminal has been changed to Foot and the launcher to Fuzzel (both Daniel Eklöf projects ). Finally, this release features a new SGS Wallpaper .
