| After almost 2 years running Arch I switched back to Windows last summer on my home laptop (Dell XPS 13 9380). The pipewire update needed by pulseaudio effects broke the sound output to my bluetooth headset.
Also at the same time a Gnome update made my desktop environment unstable.
I did not want to spend time on freezing dependencies, reverting some of them etc. Got tired at the time of these occasional maintenance operations, and not optimal hardware support. To be honest most of the update issues were related to Gnome major updates. I think an update only broke once my system, I could not login (pam configuration upgrade issue). I was running the LTS kernel. I think I had better battery life on Linux thought. It must have improved with Firefox/Chromium hardware acceleration. Arch is still my preferred distro for a dev machine thought. Back to Windows, I just updated to W11 today, I very much like the changes in the UI.
Also the ability to run some Linux GUI apps without starting a X server, exporting the DISPLAY, etc directly from the a WLS2 vm is nice. Even thought I think I'll keep my development environment in a VM (arch) mainly because of docker. I found docker for desktop on Windows really too slow. Security wise I also prefer that, I install too many tools that I don't trust. The drawback of using a VM is of course performance but that is not that an issue for the kind of dev/work I do (NodeJs/Typescript/Vue/Python/Cloudformation/Terraform). Also sometimes I have an idea or something I'd like to test quickly and I don't want to start the VM and I just give up. I'll probably stick to that 1 or 2 years, when I'll think about replacing my laptop. If I had to today, I'll probably go for a Macbook air m1. |
Have you considered trying that?