I just got a new laptop for my work (which I also use for personal stuff, it’s a family business).

It came with Windows 11 but I’d got a bigger SSD which I’d installed before I’d even turned it on so Windows never even got a chance to boot.

I installed one of the Fedora atomic distros and it seems to be pretty good, though I’m trying to figure out how to tune battery life. I’ve setup TLP but haven’t noticed any improvement, though, it’s still much better than when I first tried Linux on a laptop.

I’d never used Fedora before, but the first distro I ever used was Ubuntu Dapper Drake and I’ve dipped my toes occasionally since then, but never fully committed until now

so I might try something else first. Any recommendations?

https://distrowatch.com/

try 'em all.

Edit: PS: distrowatch's search is handy: e.g. https://distrowatch.com/search.php?defaultinit=Not+systemd [Edit: PS: maybe try {in approximate increasing ambitiousness] antix, devuan (or other respins of devuan, like expiron, peppermint, vendefoul, shebang, gnuinos), pclinuxos, salix, slackel, slackware, calculatelinux, artix, obarun, voidlinux, decibellinux, gentoo, crux (or kwort), sidelinux(?), milis(?),bedrock, guixSD, LFS. Or whatever... :) Have fun exploring.

Snagged a thinkpad today for just over 100$. Guy mentioned it was because of windows 11. Its hippie christmas for linux!

GL! Hope you have a great time.

Check out https://www.wesnoth.org/ and https://supertuxkart.net/Main_Page :D

I'd say try fedora. Then give Debian a spin as it will expose you to more technical details.

If you wanna have fun, i woild recommend bedrock linux, haven't tried it, but it sounds cool and interesting. Also nixos might be fun to try in my opinion.

I ran bazzite on a Lenovo flexpad with Intel und 630 graphics and it ran perfectly. I even ran mechwarrior 5 on it, albeit with the graphics details turned down so low that it looked like a mechwarrior game from the 1990s.

I'd give bazzite a go. Learning about how to install and use distroboxes is also lots of Linux fun.

Edit: also, you literally cannot break any of the immutable fedora distros. Very newbie friendly.

And end with Vanilla Arch, for me atleast I distro hop every week when I got into Linux for the first time and I thought I'm going to use Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE, EndeavourOS as my main but ended up using Arch Linux permanently instead. For me it's the "just work" distro easy to use and troubleshoot

Computertruhe could be happy about well working laptops! Dont hoard ;) you can try distros with external SSDs

Bazzite is the more gaming oriented flavour of Universal Blue's distros, but take a look at Bluefin if you wanna try something similar (but not focused on gaming, although gaming also works fine on it). I've used it for about a year or so myself, and I love it. It's immutable so it "just works", but I can still play around and tinker with distroboxes or VMs.

I trialed several distros on my Precision 3550 and settled on Garuda. No regrets!!