New Distro for my College Laptop

I’m looking for a new distro for my college laptop, I’m currently running Antergos and I really like it but it really doesn’t have the support I need for a lot of programs. I’m a Software Engineering student so I need access to editors for a lot of languages. Despite Antergos being largely terminal based for installation of programs, I still don’t know my way around the terminal too well. I’d like something lightweight with “pretty good” support for IDE’s and editors. I will also need to type papers but google docs and Libre Office are on nearly everything. Any recomendations are welcome.

Ubuntu 18.04, don’t think too much about it, it’s gonna do everything you need flawlessly.

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How lightweight is it? My laptop is an older Lenovo ThinkPad with less than optimal battery life.

It runs OK on low end hardware, works on my Penryn pentium so should run on a potato.

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Just be sure to install TLP

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Just a heads up, you might actually just wanna get a used macbook air for a couple hundred bucks of craisglist or something.

They have very good battery life and OSX is by far the best OS when it comes to battery life.

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My daughter was running Ubuntu Mate 17.04 on her Thinkpad T420, no problems what so ever, now running Solus MATE which also runs well and doesn’t consume much RAM. Ubuntu has more software available in it’s repos and keyboard shortcuts were preset, Solus is a rolling release, she’s happy with either - and doesn’t know any better only being 8 :slight_smile:

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No offense but I will roll over in my grave before I willingly get a macbook. I also have no reason to spend that money when I have a perfectly functional laptop right now.

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and powertop.

Powertop will tell you about powerusage on your device so you optimize it a better. Can also use it to help ensure your device have proper power management set

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LaTex for documents is a great.
Fedora or Ubuntu for ease of use and not many hassles…depending on who you ask.

Antegros is ok, but plain old Arch is way better. There’s always the AUR for stuff not in the repo list and if something isn’t in both of them you can always go pkg or compile it yourself.

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I’m interested to know your reasoning for this. The way I see it Antergos has the benefits of Arch without the hassle.

I don’t know if it’s any different on standard Arch but Antergos has Tons of dead repositories. Hence why I’m ditching it for something with better program support.

Both Antegros and Manjaro, can even…maybe include Parabola, are great for no fuss setups and such, but starting from bare minimum and shaping it is far better imho. A reason why Gentoo is a good learning experience. Get down to the base and work up from it.

When it comes to learning software it’s a good idea to force yourself to use the terminal and find out how the stuff ticks down below without the help of a gui. What goes where and why.

But of course everything will depend on the application. Ubuntu and Fedora would be good choices for a no fuss, fast and simple approach.

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The new upcomming Ubuntu Mate 18.04 might be a very good choice.
Its a really nice and easy to use distro, with allot of software pre selected in the software manager.
But since its Ubuntu base, it also holds allot of software.
Big plus of Ubuntu Mate is that its generally very stable.
But it could be that you might not like the Mate DE.
Of course there are also other flavors of Ubuntu you could go with.

Big plus of Ubuntu based distro’s is that they are pretty reliable for the most part unlike Antergos.
And allot of support can easally be found.

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Thank you for the suggestion I have since flashed Ubuntu 18.04 (standard desktop) onto my laptop. However I used Antergos for almost a year and I never had any stability issues. Also if you have any program recommendations I’m all ears.