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

  • aebletrae [she/her]English
    5•8 months ago

    For someone seemingly so eager to try out new distros, I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned virtual machines. If the vibes are off, it’s a whole lot less disruptive to find out that way.

    Your experience with drivers won’t be quite the same as a bare-metal installation, but checking out software shouldn’t be a problem.

    • CorrodedEnglish
      2•8 months ago

      Definitely. VMs are great for trialing distro and DE. They may not be great for demanding tasks like gaming without a fair amount of tinkering it should get you to the point where you can figure out if something is for you.

      That said stability is a bit more complicated and I think a lot of that comes down to personal experience and long term community thoughts. Both are why I don’t use Manjaro anymore and the personal aspect is why I still love Fedora