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’.
Add tlp package for battery life. And any major distro should be fine really
🧌 NixOS 🧌
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.
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.
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.
+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.
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.
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.
Pop Os.
Why not something like Debian Testing?
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
Removed by mod
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
