System requirements & notes

The hardware requirements might seem high at first but this is mostly due to Calamares taking a lot of RAM during installation and some other performance-enhancing applications used. For window managers, the actually needed specs are lower than KDE requirements. A thumbdrive of 4 GB is needed for regular versions while the gaming edition needs 8GB space.

Requirements (dr460nized)

Hardware	Minimum	Recommended
Disk Storage	30 GB	40 GB
RAM	4 GB	8 GB
Thumb drive	4 GB (or 8GB for gaming edition)	-

Important notes

• The idle RAM usage will most likely be higher than on other distributions as we use ZRAM and some other tweaks to enhance the general system performance. Unused RAM is wasted RAM, it’s as easy as that!
• To burn the iso to your thumb drive, use Ventoy, Popsicle, command line tools like dd, or any other reliable disk flashing utility.
• For old NVIDIA graphics cards, pick the driver from the driver table on the NVIDIA wiki page that matches the GPU. Fermi cards use nvidia-390xx and Kepler cards use nvidia-470xx, both from the AUR.

Virtual machines

We don’t recommend running Garuda Linux in virtual machines as it is optimized to run on real hardware. Some things also refuse to run in Virtualbox such as Picom or Alacritty without proper configuration. Likewise, we won’t provide support for this use case.

Dual-booting with Windows

If you are planning to dual-boot with Windows (uh) - read this Arch wiki article first as it answers most questions you might have! It’s certainly possible but Windows might overwrite Garuda’s bootloader (GRUB) which makes repairing the bootloader needed. Don’t dual-boot if you are not capable of doing this yourself.

Wayland with NVIDIA

Wayland (Sway) is not officially supported on NVIDIA GPUs. With driver 495 or newer it works if kernel mode setting is enabled and Sway starts with --unsupported-gpu.