A new version of Garuda Linux has been released. Garuda Linux is an Arch based rolling release distro that focus on performance and ease of use.

Garuda Linux "Talon" (220428)

We hope all of you are alright, and feeling fine. Almost 5 months have passed since our last release. Therefore, it was high time for a new release! Of course, we're always focused on making Garuda the best it can be, but that doesn't mean we're changing the parts of Garuda that you already love! Let's have a look at what has changed since the beginning of the year.

Garuda-update or: one update tool to rule them all 

Since updating a rolling release Arch based distro can be quite confusing to newcomers, we have developed garuda-update to make this task easier. The garuda-update tool provides a neat little helper to automate many common update tasks. It automatically updates your mirrorlist, updates keyrings, applies various hotfixes and automatically resolves known common conflicts that may occur during an update. Due to its ability to update itself before the rest of the system, the latest fixes will always be applied accordingly. Using garuda-update in the terminal is now the recommended way of updating Garuda Linux.

BTRFS integration in Garuda 

In the last few months, the BTRFS Assistant has moved to its own  GitLab org and has gained a lot of new features. Since the idea was to make it distro-agnostic, it no longer includes features like the "booted into snapshot" notification. In its place, the  snapper-tools will be used to restore snapshots while booted into a snapshot. Although its feature set it still fairly basic (but being added to regularly), BTRFS Assistant is the go-to choice for advanced BTRFS management. Additionally, since we noticed that a lot of people didn't restore & reboot right away as intended, we also blocked Pacman transactions during such situations to ensure proper handling. Many thanks to  @dalto for developing the BTRFS Assistant for Garuda and the rest of the Linux community!

Changes to our editions 

• The GNOME edition has finally gotten some needed love with  @SonarMonkey recently joining our team and taking over Gnome's maintenance. Not only does this mean GNOME has finally gotten some issues like application theming on Wayland addressed, it also means other great things will be coming in the near future.
• The Cinnamon edition received touchpad gestures, has fixed the terminal profile icon, and dropped some obsolete packages.
• The Dr460nized edition now features Fira Code as the default monospaced font, and had its Latte layout updated. Additionally, it features a few new animations like KDE's new overview.
• MATE had its theming improved by changing the default fonts.
• i3wm had its config updated, and now features a clock and calendar.
• LxQT-Kwin received an overhaul.
• Wayfire has also gotten needed changes. It now uses customized PKGBUILDs to workaround the recent dependency issues that AUR packages exhibited.
• The BlackArch edition has been removed from our offerings. Instead we have provided the ability to add the BlackArch repo to Garuda via the setup-assistant.
• The Bspwm edition has been removed due to lack of maintainance.
• The KDE Barebones edition has also been removed, however we added two new KDE editions, (KDE Git & KDE Lite).
• The new replacement for the Barebones edition is the KDE Lite edition. This new edition is even lighter than our old minimal edition as it only contains free drivers in the ISO.
• The new KDE Git edition includes all the newest KDE -git packages (built straight from master branch), which means that it contains all the latest and greatest KDE improvements and enhancements. This version is a cutting edge developmental edition, and as such bugs can be expected to be encountered.

Other changes worth mentioning 

The FireDragon browser recently received its own settings page thanks to efforts of the LibreWolf team. Here, the most important about:config values can be toggled easily, like anti-fingerprinting measures.

Garuda Linux "Talon" (220428)