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

    • hottari
      21·
      1 year ago

      Disagree. Arch is not stable at all, couldn’t be even if you wanted it to be.

      Bugs and regressions get introduced upstream all the time, these have a tendency to slip from testing into the main repos.

      Case in point, a recent glib2 update was causing NetworkManager to coredump sporadically.

      And you have to always use downgrade. Example, the newer 6.5 kernels break thermald 2.5.4 for me, so I have to downgrade a step downwards.

      Are these problems because of Arch? Not necessarily but the rolling release model has a role to play in these types of regressions & bugs.

      An LTS type of distro will face other different types of bugs. Outdated software libraries/dependencies that are rendered incompatible etc.

      But these are few and far between compared to rolling release where everything is in a constant state of change.