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.
Add tlp package for battery life. And any major distro should be fine really
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
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.
🧌 NixOS 🧌
I use xmonad/polybar/rofi/alacritty/fish 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.
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.
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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.
Pop Os.
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.
Yes, the best distro I always recommend is Fedora Silverblue, especially the KDE version: Fedora Kinoite. I hate this naming scheme though.
Sadly Fedora is controlled by Red Hat and it may get killed off soon.
I used to enjoy fedora silver blue (daily drove on Lenovo t450) then I switches to Lenovo w540 I sniped of eBay and the DRIVERS ARE AWFUL FOR EVERY DISTRO. Tried manjaro, arch, gaurdua, Debian, Ubuntu its 22.4, Ubuntu 12 and fedora silver blue, and fedora the I tried nix and got the GPU working but the driver was so old I settled on windows (even though it pains me to use).
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.
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 guess you can run fedora if you want full features of a laptop. Im currently running LMDE5, is rock solid for me this past 2+ years, upgraded seamlessly from LMDE4. I guess LMDE6 will be released soon after LM 21.2 is released. I do think that at the end of the day , whatever you choose, you can change your desktop environment so it suites you.
If you do use any debian distro, nala is a great way to update your packages.
fedora with gnome (fedora workspaces) is what i use rn :) used the xfce flavor, kde plasma one, and neither of them gave me everything i desired out of them like gnome did. gnome seems to have the leaast amount of small graphical bugs. also fedora is the shit overall, top 3 distros for sure.
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.
