When comparing Batocera vs Garuda Linux, the Slant community recommends Garuda Linux for most people. In the question“What is the best OS for gaming?” Garuda Linux is ranked 9th while Batocera is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Garuda Linux is:
Uses vram, and a zen kernel.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro User-friendly
All options are right there in the EmulationStation menu and ready to be changed at the click of a button. No distorted configuration files all over the place, no permissions to mess with.
Pro FREE and plug and play
Pro Controller variety and working Bluetooth pairing
Pairing controllers for wireless operation are so much easier with Batocera. Also easily within reach in the ES menu.
Pro Great selection of systems available
Incorporates not only Retroarch-based systems, but other emulator packages as well (AdvMAME, Reicast, PPSSPP, etc.) integrated with the EmulationStation frontend.
Pro Easy to use
Batocera is much easier to use and configure than Lakka, especially for MAME and data transferring.
Pro With some effort you can share disc with other system
Good community, github is hot, the OS is permanently developed. You may witness a real spirit of open-source. You can make it coexisting with other system (debian in my case) but to do it you need to know linux and its bootloader.
Pro Wide array of features
Batocera supports more features (like nVidia streaming) that competitors do not.
Pro Optimized performance from having a smaller footprint
Like Lakka and Recalbox, the software is the OS, so it takes up much less space and has far less demands on hardware than other emulator-based packages which have an OS attached i.e. Retropie.
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 Not for customizers
You can mess with the underlying software and code, but it's not so easily accessed. Since it's designed for user friendliness and ease of use, the software is not easy to change based on configuration options.
Con Buggy
There are still many bugs.
Con Fomrat a disk doesn't always work
Can be buggy, sometimes you are unable to format your disk at any format under Batocera.
Con Hostile fork
It is an hostile Recalbox fork.
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.