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
Arch is great. You’ve kinda dipped your toes in it with Manjaro already. I recently moved to EndeavourOS with BTRFS for my gaming computer and couldn’t be happier. I could have done stock Arch but I honestly didn’t care enough to. EndeavourOS has great sane defaults and no bloat. And you can pick almost any DE during the install. Spin up a VM and give it a try if you can.
I can’t speak to MATLAB though. But all the others you mentioned I also run.
The only issue I have right now is the half screen flickering with GNOME and NVIDIA drivers. But I just ignore it.