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

  • drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    ·
    1 year ago

    one thing ill say. flutter via aur is kinda a pain, I would reccomend installing the flutter package, not flutter-git, then adding it to ignore-pkg in /etc/pacman.conf then letting flutter handle updates

    • Ban DHMO 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      Interesting, at the moment I'm using the snap package since that's what's officially supported, so I should probably stick to that (for simplicity)

      • drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        ·
        1 year ago

        I myself detest snap, avoiding them whenever possible, the manual install method is also officially supported which is more or less what the aur does