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
My answer is “No”. Don’t do distro-hopping. It is only waste of time and distraction from actually learning Linux properly. Concerning BTRFS (and I write it as a user of openSUSE which has been supporting it for the longest time), I am absolutely certain that Debian can use it as well as any other distro. Just don’t do the distro-hopping.
Different strokes for different folks. I did nothing but distro hop for my first month or so. You learn a hell of a lot using different package managers and how distros do the same thing different ways. My advise is to have fun and enjoy yourself. If it isn’t a chore, you’ll coming back and you’ll always learn something new.
if they’re not enjoying their current base system…?? y’all need to let ppl live lmao
My Proxmox cluster has 10+ distros so I can distro hop my heart out. I like bouncing between various distro to stay fresh with package managers… And more specifically the various synax when using various distros