I’ve been using Linux as my main OS for a couple of years now, first on a slightly older Dell Inspiron 15. Last year I upgraded to an Inspiron 15 7510 with i7-11800H and RTX3050. Since purchasing this laptop I’ve used Manjaro, Debian 11, Pop OS, Void Linux, Fedora Silverblue (37 & 38) and now Debian 12. I need to reinstall soon since I’ve stuffed up my NVIDIA drivers trying to install CUDA and didn’t realise that they changed the default swap size to 1GB.
I use this laptop for everything - development in C/C++, dart/flutter, nodejs and sometimes PHP. I occasionally play games on it through Proton and sometimes need to re-encode videos using Handbrake. I need some amount of reliability since I also use this for University.
I’ve previously been against trying Arch due to instability issues such as the recent GRUB thing. But I have been reading about BTRFS and snapshots which make me think I can have an up to date system and reliability (by rebooting into a snapshot). What’s everyone’s perspective on this, is there anything major I should keep an eye on?
Should also note I use GNOME, vscode, Firefox and will need MATLAB to be installed, if there is anything to do with those that is problematic on Arch?
Edit: I went with Arch thanks everyone for the advice
So, the big thing with instability is that with Linux “Unstable” refers to “Constantly receiving updates” rather than “Breaks all the time”
In my experience, if arch breaks, 99% of the time YOU the user did it.
If you want a kinkless experience with it, keep it simple.
Arch ships with systemd, as such, it also ships with systemd-boot. Use what’s built, don’t add additional bootloaders unless you need the functionality they offer.
Gnome, Matlab, and VScode have wiki pages for installation and configuration, and Firefox is in the repos and is one line in the terminal to install (#pacman -S firefox)
For a first install, I’d recommend following the wiki to install instead of using archinstall to familiarize yourself with how to use and read the wiki.
