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
But you used Manjaro? 😂
Go for it. If you use archinstall, it is incredibly simple to get up and running. The difficulty around Arch is quite overblown except perhaps when talking about people brand new to Linux. Even without archinstall, you are just following a guide in the wiki.
Yeah even for linux enthusiasts, without archinstall, it is hard. at first. Then once you know what is expected it is easy. But the first time setting it up correctly is frustrating. Particularly if you forget to install
intel-ucode.funnily enough when that happened I didn’t realize as I was on systemd-boot 😅
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The different repos and bad reputation was my point 😉
If you didn’t want to try Arch due to instability, Manjaro is a funny choice. I was mostly kidding, anyhow.
The wiki installation doesn’t go through repartitioning your drive (like splitting a partition into two and moving the content to a single part of them), I wouldn’t try that using the Arch ISO, no sir
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide#Partition_the_disks
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Partition
Just use LVM