I’ve been running it for a long time without issue. But how “stable” it is depends on how much you read the documentation and developer announcements, and how much you fiddle with things you don’t understand. That can be true in mint or Ubuntu as well, none of them prevent you from breaking things.

Recently endeavour changed the way they deal with some firmware related packages, this would cause an error when updating, causing a handful of packages to not be upgraded. A quick DuckDuckGo search of the error message took me straight to a forum post by the devs explaining that you have to uninstall one of the related packages, and run the update again. If you didn’t think to look you’d probably panic and think your system was broken. Just an example of how the operating system itself doesn’t hold your hand. It’s up to you whether that’s acceptable or not.

On the topic of stability, save your important files on a separate drive. It’s been said elsewhere in the thread but bears repeating. As long as your files are stored in a separate drive, if you run into issues you aren’t able to fix, you can just wipe and reinstall, it maybe takes 20 minutes depending on your hardware, and while you’re experimenting and learning, it wouldn’t be uncommon for you to break some things.

Operating systems are rarely unstable. Users are the most common source of instability.

I think Fedora using either Gnome or KDE would be a great place for you to start. Ubuntu or Mint aren’t terrible choices either.

On the topic of Arch, there’s a Distro I use called EndeavourOS. It’s billed as an Arch based distro that’s geared towards the terminal, but unlike Arch it comes all of the basic software you might need right out of the box, and offers a long list of desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, and XFCE being the best choices on the list)

I use Hyprland on it, but Hyprland isnt advisable until you have some solid experience with a different desktop. Because it is geared towards the terminal, it expects you to install and update your software from the terminal. Not a difficult task, but it might not be ideal when you’re just getting started.

Install your software from official repositories and flatpak and you shouldnt have any issues. My latest install has been going strong for about 6 months without issue. Linux in general is quite stable unless you’re mucking about with things you don’t understand, and if you do like to live dangerously in that regard, it’s a great way to learn a lot.

If you’re worried about stability, keep good backups. Back up your important personal files, as well as your config files so you can reapply any customizations you had in place.

If anything happens that’s too tedious to troubleshoot, reinstall, it takes like 20 minutes tops and gets you back to square one.

You could also use time shift to create system snapshots.

I highly recommend Hyprland if you want a truly infinitely customizable UI. But, there’s a big learning curve to even using it, let alone installing it and setting it up.

You could use endeavourOS as your operating system, which is Arch based yet easy to install. I can’t speak to setting up Hyprland on other distros as I haven’t done it, but I’m sure if you look around you’ll find out what you need to know.

Big 2nd for Fedora. Fedora isn’t Debian stable but isn’t exactly unstable either, and I think having fresher packages in your main repo is worth it.

I could be mistaken, but that editor looks like nano, which is just a super simple text editor. Ctrl-x should bring quit the editor and ask if you want to save.

How were you editing PKGBUILD files before? A GUI based editor?

Yep, I guess I should have lead with that, but I’ve been on an AMD GPU for so long I almost forgot what a pain closed source Nvidia drivers can be.

Fedora works perfectly with secure boot and I keep it enabled when I’m using fedora. It’s worth noting, that if you require any software in the form of a kernel module (for instance, openrazer, a Linux tool for controlling razer devices) it won’t function with secure boot enabled because it isn’t registered at boot. You’d have to reboot to bios, turn off Secure Boot, log in and set your configs, then reboot and turn secure boot back on.

Or you could just leave it off.

Yeah, I’ve considered VR for a long while, but between the already existing headaches, and the Linux related headaches I’ve heard of, I’ll just wait until I’m retired for VR space games, VR racing, and VR porn. Hopefully it’ll get better before I’m dead.

Everything people are saying here checks out, but you might struggle with VR. I haven’t tried VR on Linux yet, but I’ve heard some things about support being pretty janky. Maybe others with experience can weigh in.

There’s a ton of them on Etsy

I would recommend Linux Mint. Yes it’s faster to update than Debian, but it doesn’t push the envelope nearly as fast as Fedora or Arch based distros.

Linux mint is just super easy, user friendly, you could use Mint without ever touching a terminal if you wanted. BSD would be a great pet project to fiddle with, but if you’re looking for a rock solid backup machine with zero fuss, Mint is perfect for that.

I fully expected all replies to miss the point. You can’t make more nuclear power without massive amounts of petroleum based energy and products.

But, again, it doesn’t matter, and isn’t worth arguing about. People don’t get it because why would they want to get it? It sucks to get it.

Die. We will die. The only crutch that props up our massive jump from 1 billion pre industrialized society to our current 8 billion human beings on this planet, has been cheap and plentiful fossil fuel. Notably, it is the only thing that has allowed us to practice agriculture on a scale that supports our population growth. When it’s gone, there is nothing to replace it, short of a miracle fusion revolution.

The average carbon cost to produce an electric vehicle is about 6 tons on average, not including the battery, about the same as an ICE vehicle. Where does the energy for auto manufacturing come from? Primarily coal and natural gas, with a sliver of insubstantial wind and nuclear power. About 7 barrels of oil go into each and every tire on the road (between expended energy and actual petroleum products in the tire). Charging the battery? Coal, natural gas, and the same trickle of alternative sources mentioned above.

Speaking of those alternative energy sources, what do we use to make them? Building a nuclear power plant is likely the most carbon intensive process ever devised, from the machinery that moves the earth, to the foundry that makes the steel. As much as I’ve always wanted to believe in a cozy eco future, every time I squint a little I can see that it’s all just a coat of green paint over the same old oil field. The people trying to sell you on oil, and the people trying to sell you on alternatives to it, are doing the same thing. Selling you something. That’s all that matters to them.

There is no feasible alternative that changes the outcome. There is no replacement for what has allowed us to create wonders and horrors beyond our ancestors wildest dreams, and sustain a population far beyond anything we could have achieved without fossil fuels. When oil finally becomes unproductive, so will the mechanisms that hold our current civilization together, and we will wind up back in 1810 if we’re lucky, or 400ad if we aren’t.

Call me a doomer and downvote me or whatever. It doesn’t matter.

Why bother with Pop!_OS when you’re comfortable with Arch? Arch is, in my opinion, better for gaming just due to its newer packages, and certainly its newer Kernel. I’ve been running EndeavourOS which is basically just pre packaged Arch, and it handles all of my gaming and productivity tasks more to my liking than any Ubuntu based distro, certainly better than Pop! did.

Also, I see no reason why you shouldn’t delete all of your old partitions and start fresh, but when you do, give EndeavourOS a whirl and see if it handles all of your dev tasks and gaming. I think you’re over complicating your system and not getting any tangible return from dual booting Pop!

I think it’s also worth noting that windows bloat and Linux bloat are not even in the same category. Even the heavier Linux distros are so light on system resources that installing a plethora of tools, games and assorted software isn’t going to effect your machine as negatively as it would in windows.

For me, the built up revulsion I feel towards windows and the sheer determination I feel to never use it again, means I would rearrange my monitors, or, you know, try more than two distros.

Linux isn’t for everyone, I acknowledge that fact. It requires a user that wants to troubleshoot, wants to figure out why something doesn’t work and make it work. If the headache isn’t fun, you’re not the right kind of masochistic self flagellator that Linux attracts, and that’s okay.

If you ever do decide to give it another whirl, try Linux Mint, MX Linux, or my personal flavor of choice, EndeavourOS. And put your monitors in a boring straight line like the rest of us before you coming crawling back.

This reply is meant to be partially humorous but entirely honest.

Here’s another vote for EndeavourOS if you need it. I run BTRFS and timeshift-autosnap, but I’ve never needed to use it. Like the other poster said, I’ve had minor annoyances and brief package conflicts, but nothing critical has ever gone awry.

I’m probably too paranoid to use someone else’s old storage media, but if I did I suppose I’d erase any existing partitioning, create a new partition (or multiple if you wanted them for some reason) and go to town.

Curious to hear if anyone has better best practices than that.

Oh. Also, post the output of inxi -G

This will tell you whether or not the driver is installed, and which version. neofetch is useless for this task.