I do it because if I can save myself some busywork and have a ready to go and maintain system…From after an install, I much prefer that. I don’t see the point of installing purely vanilla Arch. There are use cases where this would make sense, but I honestly cannot be arsed. Garuda Linux takes the pain in my arse out of Arch, makes it fun to use. Easy to keep up with .pacdiffs, merging when appropriate (or skipping pointless mergers because they build the damn distro, so they stop pointless busywork from bothering users).

I get access to the latest software and kernels, smooth performance, and all I have to do is pay attention to breaking changes (implement the fix post update) in exchange. It’s a pretty damn fine deal. The safety nets that Garuda Linux provides over traditional Arch (which is historically minimal by design) is a better deal in my opinion. However, if I had the drive; I feel like I am beginning to understand the workflow enough to potentially reproduce something similar (not one to one) on a vanilla Arch install.

Now don’t get me wrong, the archinstall script is pretty cool, the only bane about it is needing to be connected to the internet. Connecting via a command, rough AF. I honestly might’ve misspelled that command and not noticed during a frantic moment (it was a floptina moment for me, so, Arch isn’t to blame). Garuda Linux lowered the barrier, just enough that I got my foot in and got really comfortable with manual interventions and the like. But they also kept it high enough to isolate me from the AUR, but let me have their nice properly managed ChaoticAUR instead.