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.
A distro-hopper. *Noted*.
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.
Prefers starting from scratch instead of fixing. *Noted*.
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.
General-use and reliable. *Noted*.
I’ve previously been against trying Arch due to instability issues such as the recent GRUB thing.
Understandable, but not entirely justified.
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).
Fair.
What’s everyone’s perspective on this, is there anything major I should keep an eye on?
It is almost common knowledge at this point that this approach has serious merits. That's why we find it on a myriad of rolling release distros. From Manjaro to Garuda, from SpiralLinux to Siduction. Heck, even Nobara -which is not strictly a rolling release distro- has it. I wouldn't even use/recommend a rolling release distro if not for (GRUB-)Btrfs+Timeshift/Snapper. But, while by itself it is already very powerful. It still benefits a lot from testing. Which, when utilized by openSUSE in particular, manages to elevate their Tumbleweed to a very high standard. So much so, that it has rightfully earned to be named the stable rolling release distro. But not all distros are as rigorous in their testing... if at all...
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?
Nah, that's absolutely fine. *Noted*.
Should I give Arch a shot?
So there are some glaring issues here:
- You've set some parameters and asked us if Arch satisfies. Which it does, but so do a lot of other distros. Which seems to tell me that this will become yet another chapter of your distro-hopper-phase. Which -to be clear- happens to be totally fine. I'd even argue that it's preferable to do it sooner rather than later. Though the mindset of a distro-hopper might deter you from being satiated...
- As previously alluded, Arch is yet another distro that satisfies your needs. You didn't mention what attracted you towards it, nor why you'd prefer it specifically over all the other available options.
- Btrfs snapshots, while powerful, are not 100% fail-safe. Sure, nothing actually is as a random SSD crash might loom around the corner. And I'd be one of the first to tell you that using Btrfs snapshots to rollback to is an exponentially better experience than without. But we're still able to improve upon it (mathematically speaking) infinitely times, to be more precise; some systems allow us to decrease the complexity from uncountably infinite amount of states (which therefore become "unknown states") to countably infinite or (better yet) finite amount of states (which therefore actually become "known states"). The reduction of complexity that this offers and its implications to system reliability are far more impactful than the simple use of Btrfs snapshots.
Consider answering the following questions:
- Are you a distro-hopper? Or did you have very legit reasons to switch distros? If so, would you mind telling us why you changed distros?
- Would it be fair to assume that it boils down to "I messed up, but instead of repairing I will opt for reinstalling."
- If so, is this something you want to work on (eventually) or doesn't it bother you at all?
- Would it be fair to assume that it boils down to "I messed up, but instead of repairing I will opt for reinstalling."
- Why Arch?
- Would you like to setup Btrfs yourself? Or would you prefer your distro to do it for you? Or don't you actually mind regardless?
While I get why distrochooser.de is romanticized, in its current iteration it's simply not very good and anyone that is somewhat well-versed in how different distros operate and how Distrochooser works, will tell you the same. At best, it provides some orientation into what some of the more common distros are. But it fails to answer some fundamental questions in the process; like:
There are a lot of other fundamental questions that are involved in the decision for picking a distro that would have made a lot more sense than the ones found on Distrochooser. E.g. Do you use an Nvidia GPU and want this to cause no issues in the process of installation and is this your biggest concern? If yes: then just use Pop!_OS. Otherwise, move on to the other questions etc. I think the fact that a flowchart isn't used for some uses and that ultimately priorities aren't brought up to finalize the decision are the two biggest issues that Distrochooser has in its current iteration.
And we haven't even gone over the many distros that despite having little to no user base are still included in the results, while (more recent) 'staples' like Garuda and Nobara are clearly left out for reasons most likely related to the maintainers not being able to keep up with the Linux landscape. Which, to be fair, is quite hard; so I don't blame them. I, in fact, applaud them for their continued contributions and hope that some day it will become something that we can proudly present to others for their first orientation.
Allow me to end this with a question to OP: