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
Definitely give it a shot, especially if you already know C. Getting your laptop set up the way you want can take some time at first but libinput makes it easy. I’ve never had issues with Arch on my desktop + lenovo thinkpad, and I update it two or three times a week. It’s honestly surprisingly stable for a rolling release, unless you don’t know what you’re doing. There has been a couple times where I’ve messed up a binary file and had to arch-chroot in from the install medium in order to fix things. This was on me and a learning experience. The Archwiki documentation is the best source of information on the internet. I use it constantly. The AUR is never ceases to amaze me. It has nearly anything you need, even proprietary software. I am always amazed when some obscure legacy software that I need has already been compiled into a package build on AUR. The PKGBUILD files are concise and easy to understand in case you need to make changes to keep up with updated software.
Also it allows for complete control over every aspect of your desktop environment. It makes things so much easier. Despite what most people say I think systemd is great. You can easily view your services or daemons and have complete control. It makes using my OS a breeze and I am able to pump out scripts, or even run projects through hypervisors quickly and efficiently. I will likely never go back to another OS or distro for that matter, so dive in!