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 actual needed specs are lower than KDE requirements. A thumbdrive of 4GB is needed for regular versions while the gaming edition needs 8GB space.
KDE Dr460nized requirements:
- Minimum requirements:
- Recommended requirements:
Also, some important notes:
- We also don't recommend running Garuda Linux in a virtual machine 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.
- If you are planning to dualboot with Windows - read this Arch wiki article first as it answers most questions you might have! Its certainly possible but Windows might overwrite Garudas bootloader which makes chrooting & reinstalling the bootloader needed. Don't dualboot if you are not capable of doing this yourself.
- If you experience Calamares (default installer) crashing during the installation this is mostly due to not enough available RAM.
- 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.
- Dont use Rufus to flash the iso to USB - instead use dd (Etcher, Imagewriter, ..) or Ventoy!
- Don't try to use Wayland (e.g. Wayfire or Sway) if running an NVIDIA graphics card.
- For old NVIDIA graphics cards, use nvidia-390xx driver.