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.
Try the ‘tlp’ command on whatever distro you end up with. It really help with battery optimization. I’m a big Linux mint fan all of my laptops have always had it never had any compatability or driver issues with mint. Something I would maybe recommend is buying some external thinkpad batteries for the laptop off the internet. Else you can buy a big rechargeable car jumper batter pack with 12vdc car output and a car plug charger for laptop.
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.
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.
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.
It’s possible to get a relatively recent version of Adobe Photoshop, but it’s very clunky due to WINE’s arguably lackluster application support (most of the contributors focus on gaming). The alternatives can do the job though, GIMP (there’s a Photoshop style to make it more familiar) and Inkscape are pretty decent and light alternatives.
<rant> Honestly, and I don’t mean this to hate on either software as I used both a lot before I discovered piracy on Windows: the quality of GIMP and Inkscape is well below most competing FOSS projects, let alone their proprietary challengers.
GIMP is powerful, but might as well be declared abandoned with how they’ve been preparing to port it to GTK 3 for a decade. It has some great features being held back by poor hardware acceleration and falling behind features provided even by alternatives like Photopea. It’s the X11 of photo editors.
Inkscape is okay, but the workflow stinks. BoxySVG is comparatively much more intuitive if it wasn’t lacking in a bunch of features. Inkscape has also basically been abandoned imo, with the project still not managing to get Apple M1 support working on the latest MacOS for nearly a year.
The barrier to contribute to either project is also sky-high imo, with their insistence on using C for cross=platform, front end applications. Normally this wouldn’t be a massive deal but it’s one of the key reasons I think Photopea and other proprietary freeware apps are running circles on these two projects - The turnaround for features and UX is so much better with modern languages. </rant>
I’m using Ubuntu on mine almost daily as a VM with UTM in hypervisor mode. Can’t call 3d acceleration stable yet, it can lock up often… but with that, I only get about one lockup a week.
Linux Mint Cinnamon is a good choice. Even as a sysadmin and DevOps engineer I use it on my workstation because it Just Works. It has good window management, settings management, file management and just stays out of the way. Flatpak is well integrated for things you may need that aren’t natively packaged, like discord.
I’ve heard good things about PopOs too but haven’t tried it.
The RAID on your motherboard is a mess and you should avoid it like the plague. — Wendell from Level1Tech
Creating RAID with either zfs or btrfs is much more easier and they perform better than motherboard’s RAID implementations. If you want a UI, you can even install TrueNAS Core as a server and manage zfs pools, share on network etc.
I’m 40 y/o, I used Photoshop & Illustrator since I was 8 years old. When I moved to Linux I tried everything, and ended up using Photopea.com and Inkscape.
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