I’m currently on Ubuntu 22.04. I’m interested in switching to a distro that has good support for Btrfs. After trying different distros I found that Opensuse Tumbleweed has built in support for Btrfs snapshot management and it automatically displays snapshots in the GRUB menu. Didn’t find those features included in the other distros I looked at. Looks like I’ll be switching to Tumbleweed. 
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Did you tried Garuda ? It also has built-in snapshots displayed in the grub menu. I haven’t tried the GUI though so don’t know if it’s easy to use.
I consider myself a casual/basic user and Garuda has been an easy entry to arch so far. I use the dragonized version (KDE) not the Gnome.
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I downloaded the Garuda ISO and tried to run it as a VM in Virtual Machine Manager and Virtualbox. Both failed. I tried some troubleshooting for both but no luck. Looks like the Linux gods want me to use Tumbleweed.
But it’s nice to know that Garuda exists as an option to Tumbleweed. Good to know that there are at least two distros that make it easy to take Btrfs snapshots and have them appear in GRUB. I wish more distros did this.
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I can confirm that Garuda has this and much, much more. For example, Garuda uses ZRAM and also has support for running the Linux ZEN Kernal. Garuda is based on Arch so it also has access to the AUR.
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Those sound like good features, but I’m not a power user. I just browse the web, edit a few docs and spreadsheets and run a few VMs. Once in a while I fire up Audacity or Inkscape. That’s about it.
And I’m more inclined to use a distro that’s actively maintained by a big company. They have the resources to do lots of quality maintenance, updates and faster bug fixes.
But in the future I may try again to run Garuda (and google ZEN kernal and Zram to see what they are 
).
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I remember there was some caution on running Garuda in VM on their website. AUR is not rocket science, just an assurance on being able to find nearly any app you may need.
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The caution was heeded as Garuda never got running. 
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Ah, gotcha. I’m quite the opposite as I won’t use any distro maintained by any big company. By this I mean that I have a preference for distros ‘for the community, BY the community’.
ZRAM, in the most basic sense, moves swap to a memory-based block device.
I’ve never tried to run Garuda in a VM, so I can’t offer any help there.
The AUR is Arch’s super power. It’s a big reason that many prefer to run Arch-based distros.
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I thought many ran Arch because they can cut out all the stuff they don’t need. And get Linux running with less performance bloat then almost any other distro.
Arch is a bit of a Lego set, that you can include only the applications you need and not have half the background services running in the background that you don’t need.
Interesting that most of the projects designed to make Arch easy for newer Linux users try to cater for everyone and loose the level of customisation that Arch provides.
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Many do, but not all.
I run Garuda, which is a bit bloated, but they do offer a non-bloated ISO. While I do prefer to choose the applications, there’s a lot more to it than just choosing applications. Each distro includes other packages like gnome extensions, proton for gaming, etc. There’s a lot more to it than just the applications included.
IMHO, bloat creates a larger security target surface and makes for longer updates, more than it creates performance issues. YMMV
What I like most about Arch is that it, in my experience, has been very stable, usually offers the latest in Linux tech, and it has the AUR.
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Sounds good. I’ve got 40GB of RAM and in my 3 years with this laptop only once or twice have I seen any amount of swap being used. And then it was very tiny amounts.
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Hmm, you’ve got me beat. My laptop only has 32GB.
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I got it in case I wanted to play around with VMs. I don’t use VMs very often but the extra RAM is handy when I do. I like being able to assign 8GB RAM or more to my VMs. 
And I got a gaming laptop that makes it super easy to open up and do upgrades.
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System containers (LXC) are lighter than VMs, and, much faster, as a system container does not have to emulate the hardware like a VM does. I’m just say’n.
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Cool. I put them on my ‘to be researched’ list. So much fun open source tech to learn…
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