I’m thinking about buying a small budget notebook with a touchscreen for university and running a resource friendly Linux distro on it to extend battery life (and also bc windows and Google suck ass). since I’m pretty much out of my depth here: does that make sense at all? are there noob friendly Linux distros available that support touch screen/ flippable notebooks. and if so, would it also make sense to buy a lenovo chromebook rather than a windows 11 based notebook? thanks in advance!
It’s a cliche but it’s true: used Thinkpads are awesome for this. I have a 4 year old Thinkpad running Mint and it’s great. Full support for the touch screen, great battery life, and it’s damn near indestructible. Not once has it interrupted me with mandatory updates upon reboot. I got it on Craigslist for $100.
That sounds great. if you don’t mind me asking, what model are you using/ what are your laptop’s specs?
thanks! looking into it right now.
You bet! If you need any help, the community as a whole is super helpful. I’m a novice but I’m happy to help if I can, or at least try to point you in the right direction if I can’t.
very much appreciated!
100% agree with Thinkpad and Mint. Stock Mint 22.2 is a revelation compared to Windows 11.
I don’t know what their touchscreen support is like, but a good place to start looking might be PopOS. That or Ubuntu, since there’s a ton of documentation and since Ubuntu supports / is supported by most things
It depends on the notebook. In general, Linux is much more efficient than Windows (much less bloat), so in theory it should automatically lead to better battery life, However, on some (or even a lot of) notebook models, there are all sorts of weird manufacturer hardware choices, UEFI settings and whatnot which don’t always fully conform to specifications or have other quirks which the proprietary Windows drivers for that device circumvent and thus deal with in a way that leads to the intended positive result, but the open-source Linux drivers which usually follow the specifications will then lead to a negative result (usually: less power efficiency => increased battery drain). So it’s best to stick to notebook models and manufacturers which are known to be good devices for running Linux on them (or where the manufacturer even directly supports running Linux on), and not blindly or randomly buy a notebook hoping that Linux will run at 100% efficiency on every weird hardware combination.
In this situation I proably would just go for the most afforfable option, for example a Linux distro that most suits your needs (have a check at website like distrochooser[.]de or similar website), and then ask LeChat or ChatGPT for advice on how to optimize the power settings
Please use a better title in the future. Glad you got some solid advice!
You know you’re really in a Linux Forum when people bitch at the posters for not phrasing the questions the way they think they should be phrased. Lol.
Well no the title was “noob question” or something, it provides no information at all.
there you go.
Thank you <3
In the future? This is lemmy, we can actually edit titles.
I have Fedora Workstation on an old Thinkpad T470s touchscreen laptop. I don’t use the touchscreen very much but it does work.
other than the think pad recommendations, if you buy a laptop from almost any “mainstream” brand (lets say a company with a million sales or above a year), which is 2-3 years old, you will have a great experience. even 1 year is enough for like 90+% cases.
if you want to buy a chromebook, check https://docs.chrultrabook.com/docs/getting-started/prerequisites.html - only buy supported models.
in my experience, battery life has always been better than windows (but that requires some experience and knowledge about governors and other stuff, check tlp docs if you want to, and also buying mainstream intel/amd stuff (that has not a fancy architecture like hetrogenous cores))
thank you to everybody who commented and gave some useful input! it definitely helped me a lot!
