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Should I give Arch a shot?

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

ferngully ,

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.

myersguy ,

I’ve previously been against trying Arch due to instability issues such as the recent GRUB thing.

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.

notTheCat ,

is quite overblown

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

Jean_Lurk_Picard ,
@Jean_Lurk_Picard@lemmy.world avatar

Just use LVM

xchino ,

wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide#Parti…

wiki.archlinux.org/title/Partition

Ashiette ,

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.

azvasKvklenko ,

funnily enough when that happened I didn’t realize as I was on systemd-boot 😅

unionagainstdhmo OP ,
@unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone avatar

Some people don’t like to associate Manjaro with Arch since it has different repos and a bad reputation

myersguy ,

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.

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