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
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’.
pop os?
Pop!OS is great and ticks most of your boxes. Although, you’ll likely have to read into the battery optimization.
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.
🧌 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.
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.
Wow these seems really cool, good job and thanks for your contribution! I am gonna check it out!
Glad to help! I’m merely standing on the shoulders of the giants before me.
this really makes nixOs so good because I can just make others do the hard work of configing it for me and use it 😂
Unless you want to run a stake pool on Cardano, you’d have to fork and modify my config.
Add tlp package for battery life. And any major distro should be fine really
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.
Any guide for r3 3200?
I would use one of the tools listed in the archwiki; I have an intel chip so I’ve never used any myself.
Once you find a tool that can undervolt, usually the recommendation is to lower the voltage incrementally until you see unstable behavior and crashes, than raise it back to the last good voltage, then run a stress-test to verify.
Hum, any guide you followed ?
just the readme for throttled
Why not something like Debian Testing?
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.
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.
I’ve been switching my Excel tasks over to Python using Pandas and Matplotlib. Most of my data is .csv and OnlyOffice seems to handle large files just fine. LibreOffice Calc gives me issues with large files.
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.
Pop Os.
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.
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.
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.
Debian is solid. You probably don’t want to have to fuck around on a laptop that you’re using primarily for getting shit done. Flatpaks can handle most of the extra shit you’d want to use. That said, I used to be an Arch guy for years too, and if you’re comfortable with it, it’s fine to use, but you’ll run into the same kind of annoyances. Not true breakage usually, but eventually I got tired of having new surprise bugs in shit that was working fine before.
Also I can’t be sure, but I suspect Wayland is probably better on energy draw since it should be more efficient. Maybe try sway for your twm?
Not true breakage usually, but eventually I got tired of having new surprise bugs in shit that was working fine before.
yep, considering switching to nixos for this reason.
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.
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.
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.
Fedora and Debian are good choices. I’ve been using Fedora for more than 7 years and it’s still going. Very stable like Debian yet up-to-date packages.
