throwawayish

OP, my request/suggestion would be the following:

In order for us to better help you consider the following:

• Inform us on your hardware specs. You could even rely on the software found on linux-hardware.org for a (so-called) probe.
• Inform us on which distros you’ve tried. If possible, for each one of them list the following:
  • What exactly didn’t work?
  • Did you try any troubleshooting?

On a more general note, you shouldn’t feel the need to switch distros even if other distros might offer more convenient solutions.

Moral of the story would be that there are a lot of different ways that enable one to overcome challenges like these. And unless you feel the need to go with a system that’s (mostly) managed for you (à la uBlue)^[1], you will face issues every now and then. And the only way to deal with them would be to either setup^[2] (GRUB-)Btrfs+Timeshift/Snapper (or similar solutions) such that it automatically snapshots a working state that you might rollback to whenever something unfortunate befalls your system or to simply become ever so better equipped in troubleshooting them yourself.

1. But therefore demands from you to engage with the system in a specific (mostly unique) way.
2. Or rely on a distro that sets it up for you.

openSUSE’s Richard Brown has given multiple talks over the years comparing these three. I’d suggest anyone to look at those for a great rundown on how these universal package managers compare to one another. His most recent talk can be found here; in which he actually does some kind of recap as well.

They’re overrated today because they were good at some time in the past and people have to catch up. As for why they’re not that good right now:

Elementary OS had at some point in time perhaps the most polished and accessible user interface out of any distro out there. This was mostly due to how much time and effort they had put into their in-house Pantheon desktop environment. And if they would have continued their efforts, then it would have continued to flourish. Unfortunately it failed at keeping their momentum, this is most likely related to internal disputes. I say this because over the years a lot of important members from their team have departed. Right now; it’s just a shadow of what it once used to be and the likes of GNOME, KDE and Cinnamon have far surpassed their Pantheon.

While Elementary OS is just plain bad at this point, by contrast Manjaro is actually not that bad. Arguably, it does a lot of good things; Btrfs+Timeshift being one of the big ones. However, freezing packages in a rolling release doesn’t make any sense. Furthermore, it’s just very unprofessional to let the SSL certificates expire. Mind you; it didn’t happen just once or twice, but four times?!?! Today, if one wants a stable rolling release that holds their hands, they should use openSUSE Tumbleweed. If they want to use Arch, then they should just use Arch; archinstall exists. And if one is not able to install Arch using archinstall, then they should question themselves if Arch is even the right distro for them. Finally, if they seek any kind of hand-holding, then there’s a plethora of derivative distros of Arch that are as good, if not better than Manjaro. So just to make myself very clear; Manjaro is not bad, it’s just overrated; people gravitate too much towards it based on old videos/articles and what not, but it doesn’t deserve that gravitation in its current state.

• uBlock Origin: On medium mode. Honestly, the internet mostly sucks without this excellent extension.
• Dark Reader: Easy on your eyes and prolongs battery life on OLED displays.
• Redirector: This allows you to be in full control of which sites/urls you redirect and to where. As it allows the use of regex, you’re even able to create your own ‘bangs’. For example I used !x as a bang to redirect me to my favorite SearXNG instance. Kinda neat.

Unfortunately, we live in the reality in which an affordable laptop with open source (yet modern) hardware simply doesn’t exist. While the likes of Insurgo, NitroPad, NovaCustom, Purism, Star Labs, System76 and Tuxedo do commendable work on the software side of things; they still leave a lot to be desired as there is currently no laptop counterpart to what Raptor Computing Systems is able to achieve on the desktop.

Obviously I applaud Framework for what they’ve achieved for the “right to repair” and hope they’ll at least pave the way for what’s possible within the realm of open source hardware on laptops. Unfortunately, I’m a bit pessimistic as the way they’ve handled coreboot up till now has been far from desirable. But I’d love to be mistaken on this.

‘Spins’ on Fedora Silverblue had -for some time- been following a naming scheme that involved picking the name of a blue mineral that ended on “ite”. We see this in for example its KDE-spin Fedora Kinoite -which (inadvertently) happens to be the one starting this trend- and the unofficial spins of Vauxite (Xfce), Sodalite (Pantheon) and thus Bazzite (Gaming/Steam Deck). However, the official Sway-spin (Fedora Sericea) and the upcoming Budgie-spin (Fedora Onyx) don’t quite follow this naming scheme 😅.

Yes, ideally a naming scheme that’s a lot more descriptive would be awesome; like say Fedora Atomic GNOME or Fedora Atomic KDE etc.

I wouldn’t call a project with over 6k upvotes (and counting) on Github underappreciated. Perhaps what you tried to convey is that -surprisingly enough- the community is split on how they view Distrobox within the grand scheme of things. I simply can’t fathom anyone to be unappreciative of what it achieves and how. However, there are those that might regard it as one of the rising stars that represent a big upcoming change that might even be -in their eyes- an existential threat to Linux. They fear that containers, immutable distros and all of that ‘mumbo jumbo’ will threaten the freedom in which they interact with their systems. They don’t see them as (potential) solutions to long-held problems, but instead they are viewed as invasive to Linux and an attempt to <insert proprietary OS>-ify Linux and thus as an assault to Linux’ uniquely strong qualities. I wonder if if this might be somehow philosophically rooted in how some people lean towards conservatism, while others lean towards progressivism instead.

But yeah, Distrobox is excellent.

As other have already alluded to, any distro with a lightweight desktop environment should work on that laptop. However, we don’t know if it would work out for you; simply for the fact that you haven’t given any other information.

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.

A distro-hopper. *Noted*.

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.

Prefers starting from scratch instead of fixing. *Noted*.

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.

General-use and reliable. *Noted*.

I’ve previously been against trying Arch due to instability issues such as the recent GRUB thing.

Understandable, but not entirely justified.

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).

Fair.

What’s everyone’s perspective on this, is there anything major I should keep an eye on?

It is almost common knowledge at this point that this approach has serious merits. That’s why we find it on a myriad of rolling release distros. From Manjaro to Garuda, from SpiralLinux to Siduction. Heck, even Nobara -which is not strictly a rolling release distro- has it. I wouldn’t even use/recommend a rolling release distro if not for (GRUB-)Btrfs+Timeshift/Snapper. But, while by itself it is already very powerful. It still benefits a lot from testing. Which, when utilized by openSUSE in particular, manages to elevate their Tumbleweed to a very high standard. So much so, that it has rightfully earned to be named the stable rolling release distro. But not all distros are as rigorous in their testing… if at all…

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?

Nah, that’s absolutely fine. *Noted*.

Should I give Arch a shot?

So there are some glaring issues here:

• You’ve set some parameters and asked us if Arch satisfies. Which it does, but so do a lot of other distros. Which seems to tell me that this will become yet another chapter of your distro-hopper-phase. Which -to be clear- happens to be totally fine. I’d even argue that it’s preferable to do it sooner rather than later. Though the mindset of a distro-hopper might deter you from being satiated…
• As previously alluded, Arch is yet another distro that satisfies your needs. You didn’t mention what attracted you towards it, nor why you’d prefer it specifically over all the other available options.
• Btrfs snapshots, while powerful, are not 100% fail-safe. Sure, nothing actually is as a random SSD crash might loom around the corner. And I’d be one of the first to tell you that using Btrfs snapshots to rollback to is an exponentially better experience than without. But we’re still able to improve upon it (mathematically speaking) infinitely times, to be more precise; some systems allow us to decrease the complexity from uncountably infinite amount of states (which therefore become “unknown states”) to countably infinite or (better yet) finite amount of states (which therefore actually become “known states”). The reduction of complexity that this offers and its implications to system reliability are far more impactful than the simple use of Btrfs snapshots.

Consider answering the following questions:

• Are you a distro-hopper? Or did you have very legit reasons to switch distros? If so, would you mind telling us why you changed distros?
  • Would it be fair to assume that it boils down to “I messed up, but instead of repairing I will opt for reinstalling.”
    • If so, is this something you want to work on (eventually) or doesn’t it bother you at all?
• Why Arch?
• Would you like to setup Btrfs yourself? Or would you prefer your distro to do it for you? Or don’t you actually mind regardless?

Hopefully bcachefs will be merged with 6.6.