Linux Distro for Laptop

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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I recently picked an old Dell E5570 laptop from eBay to use as a secondary machine. Specs as follows:

  • Intel Core i7-6820HQ
  • 8GB x2 DDR4
  • 256GB SSD
  • AC Wifi (Not sure if DW1820 or AC8260)

I intend to use this as a secondary machine for messing around / backup machine, and I intend to use Linux on it. I need some help picking a distro.

My needs for it as a backup machine:

  • Office tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets etc.
  • Web browsing / media consumption (I use Firefox for my main browser)
  • Light gaming (All games I care about either run fine through Proton or have native Linux support)
  • Coding (I use VSCode for Python and Jetbrains suite for everything else)

What I would like to get out of the distro:

  • Good battery life (not expecting macbook levels but would want a few hours off the wall)
  • Good trackpad support (not expecting macbook levels but would like two finger gestures to work)
  • Lightweight and minimal junk (cough cough Windows 11), wonā€™t constantly sound like taking off (I swear every course I have thereā€™s always someoneā€™s windows laptop sounding like a jet engine)

Clear out some contradictory things:
I bought a machine with a quad core for performance reasons and I know that a dual core is better for battery life. However even with 4 cores it is already getting destroyed by modern smartphone chips according to Geekbench. I donā€™t even want to think about how much of a disaster the dual core chips would be when trying to do serious work.

What I already use in other places:

  • Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, 23.10 on servers
  • Ubuntu 20.04, 23.10 on PCs
  • Arch Linux on PC at home (w/ gnome, kde but not too happy with either)

My main issues with gnome:

  • Dash-to-dock is buggy in games running windowed (non issue for laptop)
  • No easy way to restart ibus daemon (I need this for typing Chinese and it starts behaving weirdly after ~3days of uptime)

My main issues with KDE Plasma:

  • I hate Dolphin
  • General rough edges

Current contenders (alternatives welcome):

  • Linux Mint w/ Cinnamon (+familiar debian/ubuntu environment), currently leaning towards this one
  • Pop_OS! (+familiar debian/ubuntu environment, -gnome, -battery life reportedly not great)
  • Fedora (-gnome)
  • Ubuntu 24.04 Beta (+familiar debian/ubuntu environment, -gnome, -snaps)
  • openSUSE tumbleweed w/ XFCE (listing because its something I would like to try out)
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I would like to preface with this: Since it is a secondary machine, try them all. Thatā€™s the great thing about Linux distro operating systems is that you have that freedom and thereā€™s absolutely nothing stopping you (no license, no ridiculous amounts of money) from trying them all.
Here are my recommendations to try: Fedora (but I prefer KDE), Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, openSUSE. Those are good choices from your own list.
Some others to check out: Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Manjaro. And one that has a bit of a learning curve but has some really cool concepts, NixOS. If you develop/program, NixOS may not be as much of a learning curve for you.
One other thing I would like to recommend, if you have a spare external USB hard drive, is once you install a distro and get it configured, setup a Clonezilla thumbdrive and make an image of the OS install to that external USB drive (you could actually partition the external USB drive with both Clonezilla and storage for your images) before you blow it away and try another distro. That way if you like it, you can easily restore it later for permanent use.
One thing I want to mention about NixOS in that regard is that all you need to do there is save your Nix config and restore it after the OS is installed for everything to be up and running again the way you had it personalized before. That includes all software you may have installed. The Nix package manager has, like, over 80,000 packages to choose from. Thatā€™s the beauty of NixOS.
Those are my thoughts and recommendation. Again, try them all, not just the ones I recommended and you mentioned. Distro hop for a while.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention as far as Fedora goes is that you donā€™t have to use the default Gnome version or the KDE version. They have other options (Mate, Xfce, Mate, i3, etc.) to install in their Spins section.

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Well yeah Linux is Linux the distro does not really matter that much.
It just depends on how much time you wish to spend to set things up,
and getting things to run basically.

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Iā€™m in the middle of going through the same thing with my laptops. One of the things I noticed with Pop!_OS and its power management is that it canā€™t set battery charge thresholds on a non-System76 device. That power management also conflicts with what TLP does (they use the same kernel controls) in a way that neither System76 nor TLP recommend running both at the same time. Ubuntu and Fedora can use TLP, with some fussing (especially in Fedora), NixOS will use whatever you tell it to.

On the other hand, I donā€™t see Dell in TLPā€™s supported hardware list at all, and likewise the same for the laptop Iā€™m looking at dual booting. But if youā€™re planning on using the device off of battery rather than AC power most of the time, then it matters a lot less.

Which I guess gets to the core point: Thereā€™s a certain level of ā€˜depends on your specific hardwareā€™ with laptops where youā€™ll likely have to try a couple distros and see what works best. Ventoy and a couple of live ISOs loaded up on that USB stick would let you test hardware, gesture support, video playback, and battery life before doing the install.

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Went through a few distros last year / 2, in finding a suitable no-hassles one
Bigg difficulty I encountered, was not identifying all hardware- peripherals [K/M/etc.]
Manjaro just effortlessly worked, in my trials [Intel Gen10 / AMD Zen2]

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I got pretty good results with powertop! I think usually itā€™s the last ditch attempt to get usable battery life before giving up altogether.

To the OP, I wonder if something like Deepin or Ubuntu Kylin might work better for Chinese input? I know there is a whole ecosystem of distros aimed at that particular part of the world. Though you will need to determine for yourself the security implications here, since some of these are developed in conjunction with the Chinese state.

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I have received the laptop and currently have Linux Mint on it.

It probably will, but I am not interested in a distro made by a mainland china company or a distro made for mainland china. God forbid an input method engine from a mainland chinese company thatā€™s definitely proprietary and probably a keylogger. Until there has been independent audits from a western entity done on distros from that part of the world I wonā€™t be putting them on my systems.

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I often, well perhaps often is a bit of an exaggeration, go through this sort of process. My original introduction to Linux was via Ubuntu with the Gnome 2 desktop which I installed on a secondhand laptop as part of a long term demonstration of Open Source Software at my Radio Club.

I stuck with Ubuntu for a very long time, with every move away from Ubuntu being reversed. When Gnome 2 was replaced with Gnome 3 I switched to the MATE desktop which was a fork of Gnome 2 and then moved to the XFCE via XUbuntu as my hardware got older and the distros larger.

More recently, not being a fan of snaps, I moved permanently away from Ubuntu to its parent distro Debian with,most recently, the Cinnamon desktop.

With my current laptop (a second hand Asus Strix) I switched to Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), avoiding the Ubuntu derived mainstream Linux Mint even through this has stripped the snaps out of the Ubuntu base, because I think LMDE is a little happier with the NVidia drivers.

Battery life is not as good as I would like and my current investigations are into how to improve this.

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Since Arch got so much easier to install my suggestion is to go for that. Youā€™re gonna get very good battery life out of it, itā€™s extremely light because you choose what to install and you can install Wayland instead of X11 to get all the fancy gestures.

If Arch is not something you like and want a lightweight familiar distro I think Mint would suit your needs, since itā€™s youā€™re considering it.

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Posting Neofetch for completeness

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image1920Ɨ1080 136 KB

I have Arch on another system and since I know how it can sometimes break itself I donā€™t think this would be a good choice for a device I will need to just work when I need it.

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Iā€™m a big fan of the Ublue spins Bazzite for games and Bluefin DX for programming.

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First of all, Linux is Linux, is Linux ā€¦ except for NixOS. Sure, NixOS uses the Linux kernel, but thatā€™s pretty much where the similarity ends. I only mention NixOS because it is a software developerā€™s playground, albeit with a steep learning curve. Honestly, it doesnā€™t matter which distribution you use, as they are all trivially easy to modify to suit your needs. Arch is easily the most configurable due to its comprehensive documentation and massive repositories. While Arch can sometimes be unstable the easy solution is to set up BTRFS with snapshots. By the way, the Arch wiki is equally applicable to most other distros, with only minor differences.

Similarly, Endeavour is essentially Arch, but with more stability. Paired with BTRFS and snapshots, Endeavour can be extremely reliable. Like Arch, Endeavour offers many DEs from which to choose.

Another choice that also offers fresh, up to date software, but isnā€™t a rolling release is Fedora. Like Arch and Endeavour, you can manually install Fedora, with BTRFS for the ultimate is recoverability, should something go South. Note that Fedora offers several different spins (with different DEs).

If absolutely, positively nothing is more important to you than the ultimate in stability, then there is always Debian. Unlike the aforementioned distros, however, youā€™ll largely be running old, moldy packages ā€¦ thatā€™s the trade off. Either run current software with a safety net (BTRFS), or a server distribution.

More important than your choice of distribution is your choice of desktop / window manager. I personally like KDE, but lets be honest, I consider KDE to be a bleeding edge, semi-rolling DE with its attendant instability and bugs. While they may occasionally fix some bugs, they typically just iterate and release a new version ā€¦ with new bugs. Even with the bugs, I still prefer it to Gnome. But, IMHO, both of these DEs are overly bloated.

Instead of the usual dynamic duo of Gnome/KDE, try some of the medium and lightweight DEs, like Budgie, Xfce, LXQt, or Mate. These are all easy to live with and in addition to these, there are many other lesser known DEs that may trip your trigger. Budgie is probably my goto general purpose DE, followed by KDE, but Iā€™m also a Hyprland fan boy.

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I would try CachyOS because itā€™s fairly close to stock Archlinux but uses the Calamares (GUI) installer and provides ZFS via that installer. In fact itā€™s the only distro I know of that provides ZFS from a comfortable GUI installer at all, other than Proxmox. Myself and a few friends have all changed from 3 years with Manjaro/KDE to CachyOS/KDE and are very happy with the results.

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I would suggest a lightweight DE for a laptop the distro really doesnt matter ā€œtooā€ much, just what your comfy with. I did a setup of ubuntu with mate for my mom on her laptop and it performed well for her use case which is similar to yours, it also helped me with updates and the like sense i already use kubuntu. And i agree with @t3kg33k a bootable usb is a wonderful thing, go wild with it and who knows you might end up running Hanna Montana linux lol

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Not sure about light DEs. Plasma recognizes all those control buttons that control monitor, fan control, keyboard lightning all out of the box on my laptop. On the other hand I had to manually set those on Hyprland.

What is the definition of light nowadays anyway? We are not LARPing with 30 year old think pads anymore are we? There should be plenty enough resources to run KDE or Gnome with negligible impact.

Nixos is a normal distro with all the GNU user land. What makes it different is system and package management. And itā€™s not the only exception as every immutable is creative-weird in its same way.