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

  • @[email protected]English
    2•8 months ago

    While fedora kde spin is my favorite some other good opinions are opensuse, debian, and something arch based if you want something a bit different. Out of all of those debian will feel the most comfy but its not known for having up to date packages since they do lots of testing before pushing an update.

    • I'm back on my BS 🤪English
      2•8 months ago

      cool 😎 beans 🫘

      I’m waiting for my brain to come back, then I’ll do some testing. You’re right about Debian being a bit behind for my taste. I hear great things about Fedora, but that means I’d have to learn a whole new distro compared to Debian based ones. I still might give it a try on a laptop to see what I think. Arch is way too much for my level of Linux competence and willingness to put effort into learning and troubleshooting it. I’ve heard good things about Tuxedo OS, though the YouTuber that promoted it was transparent that he was being paid by Tuxedo for advertisement.

      If you don’t mind sharing just a little, what do you think I should know or read up on regarding switching to Fedora? Or another way of asking is what difficulties can I expect and how can I prepare? I’m guessing the terminal commands, installation process, and package repos would work differently? Also, since Fedora uses a different package system (so not deb), would I be more limited on what programs I can install in general?

      • @[email protected]English
        2•8 months ago

        The main version of fedora comes with gnome but you have opinions for KDE. A lot of people just install KDE along side gnome but I like Fedora KDE spin because it feels cleaner not having the gnome apps. Even though you can use fedora right after install there are a few things most people like to do first. You will use dnf (its like apt but in fedora) and flatpaks mostly.

        • Fedora doesn’t have the best multimedia by default so you need to install some stuff using this thing here.
        • Next you should enable rpm fusion. rpm fusion lets you install more stuff using fedoras package manager dnf. look here to see how to enable rpm fusion.
        • Next enable flathub. flathub adds more packages to flatpak. flatpak in fedora here.

        After that you should be good to go. With rpm fusion and flathub there really isn’t going to be any packages you can get in debian but not fedora