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
Arch is a barebones distro so it makes sense that you have one of the best battery life.
My old 2012 dell laptop is running Arch and so far : the battery which has been used extensively boasts ~2:30 of uptime (on KDE, no less!) compared to Win10 which has only ~1:25 or Fedora which gives me a meager ~1:15.
I cannot tell for OpenSuse because for whatever reason I can’t even boot it on this PC. It was my main go-to distro before 2012.
Debian is also solid. I get almost ~2h of uptime.
I have also used Zorin OS which is nice but rather slow on older hardwares.
So overall go for Arch (again), Debian or take a wild guess at NixOS.
There can be a lot of trial and error figuring out the best way to deal with power management, fans etc on Arch.