Some interesting news just came out of the Garuda camp—a rolling-release distro based on Arch Linux, known for its focus on performance, eye-catching visuals, and user-friendly features.
The team is implementing some significant changes under the hood, and more specifically, they revealed that modern hardware profiles will soon replace the old mhwd-powered ones automatically during the next system update. If you’re running Garuda, here’s what you need to know.
The new hardware profiles—essentially metapackages that handle driver installations and system tweaks—will seamlessly replace their legacy counterparts for most users. The switch will happen on its own, with the following automatic replacements:
- garuda-video-linux-config -> garuda-hardware-profile-standard-x11
- garuda-nvidia-config -> garuda-hardware-profile-nvidia-closed
- garuda-nvidia-prime-config -> garuda-hardware-profile-nvidia-prime-closed
- garuda-virtualmachine-guest-config -> garuda-hardware-profile-vm
Now, here’s the catch: if you’re using an older NVIDIA driver (like the 470xx series), your setup won’t be automatically converted. That’s because there’s no direct modern equivalent for those legacy profiles. The Garuda team isn’t pulling support outright—those older setups will continue to work—but they’re officially labeling them as unsupported.
With that said, for most users, nothing changes. The new profiles are designed to function similarly to the old ones. But if you’ve got a newer NVIDIA GPU (Turing family or later), the team suggests ditching the -closed variant for better performance.
Meanwhile, if you’re still clinging to those ancient NVIDIA drivers (looking at you, 390xx and 470xx users), it might be time to upgrade. The team isn’t actively breaking them, but they’re not lifting a finger to keep them alive either.
In another major shift, the Garuda Settings Manager is being discontinued. Thanks to an update in Arch Linux’s hwinfo package, the tool is officially on life support. It’ll vanish automatically in the next system update, and the team strongly advises against trying to keep it around—doing so would mean downgrading dependencies, and that’s a messy road nobody wants to go down.
On top of that, the mhwd (Manjaro Hardware Detection) tool, which Garuda previously relied on, is also being phased out in favor of the simpler garuda-hardware-tool. The team called mhwd a “maintenance nightmare,” so they built a leaner alternative that does the job without the headaches.
For more information, refer to the post in Garuda’s forum.
