I want to know your opinions on the best distro that is convenient for laptops. Main reason is I want to really optimize hardware performance and more specifically battery life for my University classes. I also want to try a tiling manager as they seem perfect for laptops.

Things of note:

  • Convenience/Performance is key
  • My laptop is a Thinkpad E15 w/ 16 gb ram
  • On my home desktop I run Archlinux w/ Open box & no DE (I’ve been using Arch for years but haven’t used another distro since Ubuntu in highschool)
  • I will likely dual boot with Windows 10 for Office
  • I want to run a tiling manager
  • I don’t video game
  • I wont be using a mouse
  • I don’t necessarily want to use Arch, want to try something new that I don’t have to rely on AUR updates for certain software
  • VirtualBriefcase@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    My understanding is that it’s not really the disrto, but the software running on it that’d effect battery life and performance. Both Debian and Arch can come pretty bare bones on a blank install (Ubuntu and derivatives tend to come with a fair bit of stuff bundled out of the box).

    I’d personally reccomend trying a Debian installation (I’d likely say use stable, but testing or sid are also options if you need quicker updates and don’t care for flatpak/snap/appimage/distrobox). The installer plays nice with Windows, and you can skip installing a desktop during installation then CLI install a tiling window manager to really minimize ‘bloat’.

  • demesisx@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    🧌 NixOS 🧌

    I use xmonad/polybar/rofi/dunst with Home Manager and flakes. You could just use my whole config and have it up and running in a day, deleting lines and adding others. Fork it and modify it to meet your preferences (as I did when I forked this amazingly slick config). I even made a custom typeface to add my favorite crypto logos to my Polybar.

    • evirac@vlemmy.net
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      1 year ago

      this really makes nixOs so good because I can just make others do the hard work of configing it for me and use it 😂

    • Steamymoomilk@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      YESS!!! I just switched from vanillaOS to Nix and its been a learning curve but if you screw up you just go back a generation and rebuild. And I haven’t had any package manager BS like ubuntu.

    • DataDreadnought@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      +1 for NixOS

      I’m a distro hopping junkie and NixOS has been keeping me on their OS for 8 months now. Highly recommend it.

    • Lanthanae@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      Also running NixOS on my laptop. It took longer to configure than most distros since I had to learn more, but now that I understand the ecosystem better I feel like I can tinker with it so much faster that I’d be able to otherwise.

      Definitely a distro for more developer types who are fine figuring stuff out in their own, but if it works for you then it really works for you.

      • demesisx@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I absolutely adore it. Today, I added a simple bash script to one of my config options that runs just before my nix flake update command that gets the sha256 hash for the latest release of the Cardano-node then writes that hash into my flake.nix file using sed. Then, when I do a flake update that little hash update (that I used to manually do) is also built in.

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Add tlp package for battery life. And any major distro should be fine really

    • taxon@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Pop!OS is great and ticks most of your boxes. Although, you’ll likely have to read into the battery optimization.

    • astraeus@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      I’ve had a pretty good time with PopOS. GNOME is a bit rough at times (handling window sizes, font size changes, monitor layout updates) and I only had DisplayLink driver issues, which is probably trivial for most personal users nowadays.

  • Justin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Do you really need to dual boot for office?

    I’m doing fine compatibility wise with the OnlyOffice flatpak. If you have a school account with Microsoft perhaps the PWA for Word, etc. will meet your needs.

    For a laptop distro with a good tiling DE out of the box you might enjoy Pop!_OS.

    • karlthemailman@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      File compatible is one thing, but I just can’t get over the difference in shortcut keys/workflow.

      Plus, creating and editing charts is still miles easier in excel.

  • IncidentalIncidence@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    specifically battery life for my University classes

    try undervolting your CPU/GPU. That was the first thing I did when I got my thinkpad and it improved the thermals and battery life significantly.

  • Smokeydope@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Try the ‘tlp’ command on whatever distro you end up with. It really help with battery optimization. I’m a big Linux mint fan all of my laptops have always had it never had any compatability or driver issues with mint. Something I would maybe recommend is buying some external thinkpad batteries for the laptop off the internet. Else you can buy a big rechargeable car jumper batter pack with 12vdc car output and a car plug charger for laptop.

  • solidsnail@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Some thinkpads have official support for Ubuntu by the manufacturer (lenovo), which means battery optimizations out of the box, amongst other things. Might be relevant for your laptop.

  • RecursiveDescent@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    I liked using fedora Sway spin on my Dell XPS 13. Sway because it let’s you utilise the screen space well and fedora spin because it came working out of the box, you can use it in any distro really.

  • Thomas@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been using Fedora on my Dell XPS and it’s been great. Opensuse Tumbleweed was also fantastic.

  • The Postminimalist@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    If you absolutely must use MS Office, and don’t want to use any of the alternatives like LibreOffice that use the exact same file types, why not just run MS Office with Bottles? If that’s the only reason for a dual boot, you probably don’t need to dual boot.

  • MashingBundle@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    In terms of optimization, Gentoo is the best you’re gonna get, but the word “convenience” makes me hesitant to recommend it to you.

    Arch is minimal, and has many resources/guides on battery optimization (Especially for ThinkPads), but if you’d like to learn something else, Void is the way to go.

    If you’re looking for a tiling WM, I can wholeheartedly recommend bspwm. Lots of control and customization, but pretty easy to configure when you understand it. Just know, it might be a hard change going from stacking to tiling.

    • Jean_Lurk_Picard@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Hmm I’ll check out the battery optimization guides. I understand Gentoo is probably the best for overall optimization but I’m not advanced enough to use it.

      • MashingBundle@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        1 year ago

        If you can set up and maintain an Arch installation, you can probably figure out Gentoo. It wasn’t too bad when I did it. It’s just not very convenient. in order to properly optimize, you have to set your use flags for each package. Not only that, but packages are compiled from source, rather than installed as pre-compiled binaries. So basically, you have to configure each package and updates take much longer.

  • bahmanm@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    OpenSUSE Tumbleweed FTW. I’ve got an old T530 (2012) who’s been happily on Tumbleweed since 2019.

    Nowadays I use vanilla Gnome but had a very good experience with Awesome on the same setup. You may want to check the default Sway setup too.