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
How well does openSUSE Tumbleweed handle proprietary stuff like NVIDIA drivers?
I’ve been using it on my main box for a few years with a 1070 and then a 2080 without issues. Not that it means anything. I’ve never really had issues with nVidia despite running Linux for 25+ years and having used a fair number of their cards, but according to the Internet I’m the only one on the planet. So YMMV.
There is definitely a caveat with nvidia. The nvidia repo is managed external to the main repos, so it is possible for a new kernel to drop in the system repo and the nvidia repo not yet be updated with a compatible driver.
I always wait a few days on such updates and watch the mailing lists for problems especially from nvidia users. So far I’ve only experienced problems due to prime wonkiness that required re-running a couple of prime commands. I haven’t had to use the boot-from-btrfs-snapshot yet, but it’s a nice security blanket.