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!

  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
    4·
    2 months ago

    I think you will be disappointed by battery life. It is almost always worst on Linux than Windows. Sometimes much worse. Mine get 90-120 minutes. Yeah in 2025. Apple just released a MacBook with 24 hours of battery life.

    Doesn’t matter too much to me because I almost always have it plugged in, but yeah.

    • lemminger@thelemmy.clubOP
      0·
      2 months ago

      hmmm. So you’d recommend just working with windows 11 then? cuz basically battery life is what’s most important to me. can’t afford new stuff, especially not a MacBook.

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
        0·
        2 months ago

        Yeah. If you pay a few dollars for a product key from one of those grey market sites (legally dubious but there’s no danger to you) you can get Windows 11 IoT LTSC which is a version of Windows without all the crap that people complain about.

        I’ve been running that on my desktop for a while and the only problem I ran into was that Winget doesn’t work by default and it is quite a pain to get working (I did manage in the end but it involved downloading some core windows file from a random windows help website which isn’t ideal).

        The only reason I needed it is because OCaml is only distributed on Windows with Winget. I think the Windows Store also probably doesn’t work (never tried) but that’s a bonus. Same for the Windows game bar, whatever that crap is. (Steam and games themselves work fine.)

        Other than that it’s rock solid and a nice improvement over Windows 10. It can even install printers quickly and reliably which I thought I would never see in my lifetime (Linux still can’t).