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.

I think it’s pretty normal for people to want their high end thing to look high end, or whatever high end looks like to them. My PC case is basically a black rectangle with a single pane of glass on one side. It has some rainbow vomit lighting inside that isn’t all customizable with Linux, but my razer mouse mat, mouse, and keyboard all glow a lovely purple, just one static color. My desk, peripherals and case all match in black, so really any color I choose to run with makes for an easy vibe change.

I think maybe a half a dozen people have even seen my pc setup, and I don’t really take visitors back there, so whatever cool looks my setup has are just for me, and I enjoy it.

That said, there is a such thing as it being too busy, too gaudy, etc, so I totally get what you’re saying. My shit is lit up but I still feel like it’s fairly subdued.

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.

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The current US administration and its demagogues and lackeys have been doing all sorts of things they shouldn’t be able to do in a normal society. You’d be amazed at how quickly they’d be able to shut down a form of mass media they can’t control.

It’s fine if you don’t like my mentality. I’m highly selective about who I let into to my day to day life in meatspace. I like small gatherings, and keep a high bar for who I want to associate with. I don’t see why I shouldn’t apply the same principle to my internet life.

Do you want them here? I don’t. I don’t tell a soul about lemmy, because this is place for me to get away from them. A place for mostly rational discussion, populated by people free thinking enough to seek an alternative. If the masses descended on Lemmy, they’d ruin it like they ruin everything else. They’d draw the attention that would lead to it being litigated, regulated, purchased, corporatized etc. Let them stay on Facebook and Reddit.

Edit: ITT: A bunch of people who haven’t paid attention to how mind bendingly stupid content has become on mainstream social media, or worse yet, actually enjoy the chum pumped out by Facebook and TikTok and want it to come to lemmy as well. I’ll wear my downvotes with pride.

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.

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.