[tommodev]

yeah, I took the Ubuntu / Fedora perf for granted as well. Recently switched back to Arch on a whim across one low-end machine, one high-end machine, and both run like lightning compared to Ubuntu 24.04 / Fedora 40.

Expected the difference with Ubuntu as it packs more out of the box for the enterprise behaviours, not so much with Fedora. I've had no freezes, faster startup and shutdown, generally more responsive desktop etc. with Arch.

Generally, though a rolling release it also has fewer moving parts as well - only having to deal with the main repo + flatpak (and a select few AUR pkgbuilds) is nice compared to Ubuntu where I had to layer deb repos + PPAs + flatpak + brew to get my tooling in place without having to script my own git-driven installers.

One thing that tripped me up on any distro - the defaults for TLP (vs power profile daemon) seem hyper conservative wrt performance, probably by design. I never bothered digging in, just switched back to PPD, but it definitely prioritises power savings above all else.

[jillesvangurp]

I've been on Manjaro (arch based) for a few years now. I only ever installed it once and regularly update it. I've had some minor issues over the years but was able to resolve them. Mostly updates are without issues and when they aren't usually the fix is a google search away and pretty straightforward.

And of course just about everything has been updated many times at this point. Latest kernel, gnome, etc. Nice when a bunch of Intel driver performance improvements landed a few years ago. I got them right away after that kernel got released and noticed a slight difference. A few months ago, I noticed a few more improvements with performance when a bunch of btrfs fixes landed.

It's a good reason to stick with rolling releases. And since the Steam Deck uses Arch, getting Steam running on this was ridiculously easy. I'd use it professionally except I have a Mac Book Pro M1, which is really nice, and the Samsung laptop I run Manjaro on is not great, to put it mildly.

I check once in a while but there are a lot of compromises out there in terms of different laptops but none of them really come close to Apple. They all do some things well only to drop the ball on other things. You can have a fast laptop but not a quiet one. You can have a nice screen but then the keyboard or touchpad is meh. Or the thing just weighs a ton.

I think that was the point with the Surface Pro 4 in the article. It's a bit crap in terms of performance but the formfactor is nice-ish. Of course the touch support isn't great, which is no different with Manjaro. Except of course you do have access to all the latest attempts to address that.