Do you feel like Ubuntu is holding you back, but switching feels too risky? What if a “niche” distro could give you more power and better stability? Well, here’s how switching to a less popular alternative helped me find my forever distro.
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Why Ubuntu slowly stopped working for me
The compromises I kept making—until I couldn’t anymore
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek
I started my journey into Linux with Ubuntu, and I still have a lot of good memories attached to it. It was never perfect, but I managed to make it work—installing GNOME extensions, tweaking settings, hunting down PPAs, and making the occasional compromise.
Now, there wasn’t a grand failure that eventually made me ditch Ubuntu. Instead, it was a slow accumulation of small incidents that pushed me to explore other options. In retrospect, I can boil everything down to two specific points of frustration.
GNOME kept breaking my workflow
Every major update meant broken extensions and lost productivity
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek
GNOME, the desktop environment powering Ubuntu, is minimal and bare-bones by default. I, however, love customizing my computer—tweaking it, making it more powerful, and tailoring it to how I actually work. The saving grace is that GNOME is extensible—you can make it significantly more capable using third-party extensions.
Unfortunately, every major GNOME update tends to break most of those extensions, and it usually takes around two to three months for developers to patch them back to working order. I experienced this firsthand, migrating from Ubuntu 21.04 LTS to Ubuntu 21.10, jumping from GNOME 3.38 to GNOME 40.
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Firstly, since Ubuntu is not a cutting-edge distro, I had to wait over six months to get my hands on GNOME 40—watching from the sidelines with some serious FOMO. You’d expect that waiting meant a better, more stable experience, but when I got it, most of the extensions I use stopped working, completely breaking my workflow.
Now, the blame here sits more with GNOME—but Ubuntu ships with GNOME, so if I don’t like GNOME, that emotion also carries over to Ubuntu.
Hunting down PPAs and missing packages became a point of friction
Installing apps felt harder than it should
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek
Every Linux distro has an official repository of apps and packages maintained by a trusted team of developers. It allows you to install apps as seamlessly as you download them from the mobile app store—and that too, with the utmost confidence. However, the problem is that not all apps are available on the official repos.
This is where third-party repos come into the picture—for Ubuntu, these are called PPAs (Personal Package Archives). Now, there’s no official store curating these PPAs. You need to hunt down individual sources and figure out which ones are actually trustworthy. It introduces a level of friction that makes installing apps even more convoluted than on Windows.
Snap apps felt slow on my hard drive
Snaps are containerized packages that are distro-agnostic, making them easy to distribute and run across distros. Many developers started making their apps available as a snap. And this became Ubuntu’s answer to the big app availability problem. You also got a storefront which showed an app’s rating and user reviews, which helped streamline the app evaluation process.
However, one of the main problems, at least for me, was the containerized architecture. Snaps were painfully slow to load on my hard drive. Some snap apps took close to a minute to start after a fresh boot, whereas the DEB version only took a couple of seconds.
Furthermore, Ubuntu started to push snap apps over DEB packages—for example, when you enter sudo apt install firefox, you’d think you’re downloading the DEB package, but it’s actually installing the snap version of Firefox. This became another point of friction, especially considering how other distros had apps I wanted to use available in their official repos—no containerized nonsense.
I realized I didn’t want ‘safe’—I wanted capable
Other distros showed me that ‘safe’ is just another word for ‘limited’
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | ZinetroN/Shutterstock
While using Ubuntu, I was always distro-hopping on the side to explore the Linux landscape. While I found many appealing alternatives, I kept using Ubuntu because of its rock-solid reputation for stability and reliability. I was using Linux as my daily driver, and I needed something I could actually count on—so switching always felt like a risk I wasn’t ready to take.
However, the longer I distro-hopped, one thing started to become clear—these alternatives aren’t nearly as buggy or unreliable as they’re made out to be. Safety and stability for me never really meant protection from viruses or malware, because I know how to protect myself. Buggy updates breaking my system was the real fear. However, the other “less safe” distros I was testing never felt that buggy. They were safe enough. So I started recreating my workflow and testing them as a potential Ubuntu replacement.
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How this niche Linux distro finally fixed my biggest frustrations
Garuda wasn’t an obvious choice—but it was the right one
As I jumped around the popular distributions, I noticed a pattern: most of them were either beginner-focused and Windows-like—e.g., Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Zorin OS—or they were highly customizable and extremely technical—e.g., Arch, Gentoo, and Debian.
Now, I wanted something in the middle—powerful, customizable, but still approachable. Unfortunately, the middle ground turns out to be pretty niche—there’s no marketing push behind it and most people don’t even know these options exist. As such, it took a minute before I stumbled onto Garuda Linux, but once I did, there was no looking back.
KDE Plasma is powerful by default—no need for third-party extensions
Everything, everywhere, all at once
Garuda Linux supports a bunch of popular desktop environments including GNOME, but its two flagship editions—Dragonized and Mokka—are both built on KDE Plasma, and that was a complete game changer.
Plasma is the most powerful Linux desktop environment, giving you access to almost every single option you can possibly think of. All these features are baked into the DE and don’t need any third-party extensions. So not only do I have access to all the features I can possibly need, but I don’t need to worry about them breaking after an update. In fact, at the time of writing, KDE Plasma 6.6 has just been released. I’m on it right now, and I’m experiencing no glaring bugs or hiccups.
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The Chaotic AUR solved my package friction overnight
All the apps I wanted in one place
Garuda is based on Arch, which means you have access to the AUR (Arch User Repository)—a massive community repository with tens of thousands of packages. Almost every app that’s available on Linux is available (most likely) on the AUR. It’s one of the biggest reasons why Arch is so popular. The main complaint with the AUR is that it doesn’t house apps but rather build scripts—instructions that a tool called an AUR helper uses to build the app or package you want to install on your machine.
This can introduce a level of friction as now you have to build the app and also inspect the script to ensure you’re not running something malicious. Now, Garuda mitigates much of this by shipping with the Chaotic AUR. It’s a separately maintained repo of precompiled binary AUR packages, so you don’t have to build them on your machine. Furthermore, it mainly houses the most popular AUR packages, which naturally have more eyes on them, making them less of a security risk.
This Arch-based distro felt more stable than Ubuntu
The built-in fallback system gave me peace of mind
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | AYO Production/Shutterstock
Garuda is based on Arch, which is a rolling release distribution—meaning you get the latest updates as soon as developers push them out. On paper, that should make it considerably less stable than a fixed-release distro like Ubuntu, where updates go through extended testing before reaching you.
However, in practice, I’ve found Garuda to be stable enough for daily use. It uses the Btrfs file system and is programmed to take automatic system snapshots right before updating the system or installing an app. As such, if an update or package breaks the system, you can easily roll back to a previous working state and wait for the bug fixes to arrive before updating again.
In fact, this actually makes it even more stable than Ubuntu. For example, if I break my system while experimenting, I can easily fix it by rolling back to a previous working state. Now, technically, I can also do this on Ubuntu by using a tool like Timeshift, but I need to manually set it up. Garuda, on the other hand, comes with the snapper system preconfigured.
I realize this distro is not for everyone
Because recommending a distro to everyone is what created this mess to begin with
Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek
Garuda Linux is my forever distro—but I’ll be the first to admit it might not be yours. For starters, it has a very bold, flashy, and opinionated design aesthetic. If that’s not your thing, you’ll find yourself spending at least a few hours undoing everything—more if you’re unfamiliar with KDE Plasma.
Then there’s the fact that it’s a rolling release distro, which means you need to update it at least once every two weeks. As such, if you want your system running for months without touching it—maybe you have a Linux-powered server or home lab—this might not be the best fit for you.
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