When comparing Recalbox vs Garuda Linux, the Slant community recommends Recalbox for most people. In the question“What is the best OS for gaming?” Recalbox is ranked 2nd while Garuda Linux is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Recalbox is:
It has a simple and easy to use UI.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy user interface
It has a simple and easy to use UI.
Pro PLUG & PLAY - if you boot on it, it works
- It can be portable and ready to use.
- You can dual boot (wiki support for dual booting.)
- Updates and support by the community.
Pro Easy to configure
Almost all configuration are done via user interface.
Pro Faster
Build on top of buildroot, the system only have the necessary services to run.
Pro Custom EmulationStation built for Recalbox
EmulationStation is customized to fit Recalbox features, making the configuration a lot easier.
Pro Super-fast
Uses vram, and a zen kernel.
Pro Themes
The dr460nized KDE theme is awesome.
Pro Easy entrance to Arch Linux
Filled to the brim with lots of quality-of-life changes and optimizations that are simple enough for long-time Windows, long-time Mac users, and Arch newbies to understand. Though, it also leads to bloat or not necessarily helpful extra software. If you're not into the "bloat" added in, try checking out the barebones version, you'll need to know a lot of things bout Arch to fully use barebones.
Pro Highly customized interface
You already have most of the customization done for you out of the box.
Pro Unused RAM is wasted RAM
It takes just a bit more RAM than Manjaro. Edit: This statement is only true if it helps the user and since this could be running on a low end machine this will not.
Cons
Con Toxic community
If you're not French, they will make zero effort to help you. Switch to Batocera, their community is miles ahead from Recalbox.
Con Needs the whole disk
There is no option to install the system in dual-boot with another OS on one hard disk drive.
Con Needs a lot of RAM
Minimum is 4GB, for most Linux distributions it's 2GB or less.