[jiehong]

This is a pretty in-depth list of steps! I’m amazed!

Yet, it makes me feel like the situation is not changing that much on Linux for laptops: most of this should be more automated IMO.

An apple silicon MacBook Pro is quite a bit more expensive, but all of that has mostly been done for you and mostly “just work”, and there is value in that.

[prmoustache]

>Yet, it makes me feel like the situation is not changing that much on Linux for laptops: most of this should be more automated IMO.

This is an archlinux user. You cannot automate and generalize personal opinions and settings. For 1 user that wants his screen to go down to 60Hz on battery you might have 5 who will say they can't use a computer with such a low refresh rate.

A user who wants something that "just work" would have installed his computer with the latest Fedora, Mint or Ubuntu and would be using the default desktop with default sane defaults and terminal and would have been perfectly happy with it.

[jdecourval]

Exactly. This guide makes the computer my own. I'm always astonished when I see ArchLinux users openly praising the distro. It's great... but for people like me. I especially wouldn't recommend using it on a laptop, since skipping a few steps could mean an awful battery life, while other distro would be decent by default.

Having said that, my guide does use some advanced or very recent tricks that are not done by most distros. To which extent all of that help? Hard to say, but we are clearly in the premature, but fun, optimizations territory.

[boudin]

It depends of the distribution you're going for. Using Arch or Gentoo means spending more time doing fine tunings.

Installing something like Fedora is super easy.

[tracker1]

I've found that using Pop tends to be more straight forward... the only things I've had to do is a grub option for proper touchpad support on a Lenovo laptop, and I've had to use a USB wireless or ethernet card to run updates and get the wifi working.

I'm mostly using it on my desktop, but have setup laptops for friends. Of course System76 that makes Pop sells hardware, so I'd expect them to do better than most in that space.

[happymellon]

It's in-depth because it is someone's instructions for setting up Arch, not Linux.

I don't need to do any of these things with Fedora or Suse.

[Delk]

I'm also not sure that lots of the stuff in the optimization part is actually needed or useful. A lot of it seems like micro-optimization. The author probably cares a lot about tweaking his laptop. If you want to do those steps just in case they might gain you a bit of battery life, you can do them. If you don't care about compiling your own kernel for potentially getting a 1% longer battery life, the vast majority of that stuff shouldn't be needed.

Of course some tweaks might actually have an effect. There are probably actual differences between different pstate driver modes or governors. (But even then it might be dubious whether you need to or should tweak them with TLP since power-profiles-daemon should supersede it in terms of energy/perf policy.)

[BizarroLand]

I'm not an Arch user, but I have noticed pretty poor battery life and sound volume on my Lenovo Legion laptop with every linux flavor I have tried so far.

Pop! OS, Ubuntu, Fedora, & Mint have each been tested and had similar flaws, although Fedora was the only one that automatically reconnected my bluetooth speakers on wake.

I'm going to use this post to more thoroughly examine what information I can learn about my laptop and see if I can uncover where the weaknesses are and how to resolve them.

[Delk]

Yeah, there could be some useful tweaks. I started getting much better battery life on light to moderate load on my ThinkPad when I switched the AMD pstate driver to passive mode. I don't know if that has performance implications but responsivity seems fine to me.

If your Legion has a discrete GPU, that might be outside of the tweaks in the post, though.