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
    42·
    1 year ago

    Arch is bound to break every once in a while, that’s just the deal you get with a rolling release distro. If stability is all you want, you can go with the BTRFS snapshots and hope to heavens this setup doesn’t break or use something stable like Debian or Fedora.

      • 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 Outdated software libraries/dependencies that are rendered incompatible etc.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.