I want to know your opinions on the best distro that is convenient for laptops. Main reason is I want to really optimize hardware performance and more specifically battery life for my University classes. I also want to try a tiling manager as they seem perfect for laptops.
Things of note:
- Convenience/Performance is key
- My laptop is a Thinkpad E15 w/ 16 gb ram
- On my home desktop I run Archlinux w/ Open box & no DE (I’ve been using Arch for years but haven’t used another distro since Ubuntu in highschool)
- I will likely dual boot with Windows 10 for Office
- I want to run a tiling manager
- I don’t video game
- I wont be using a mouse
- I don’t necessarily want to use Arch, want to try something new that I don’t have to rely on AUR updates for certain software
Do you really need to dual boot for office?
I’m doing fine compatibility wise with the OnlyOffice flatpak. If you have a school account with Microsoft perhaps the PWA for Word, etc. will meet your needs.
For a laptop distro with a good tiling DE out of the box you might enjoy Pop!_OS.
File compatible is one thing, but I just can’t get over the difference in shortcut keys/workflow.
Plus, creating and editing charts is still miles easier in excel.
I’ve been switching my Excel tasks over to Python using Pandas and Matplotlib. Most of my data is .csv and OnlyOffice seems to handle large files just fine. LibreOffice Calc gives me issues with large files.
True, office compatibility is great nowadays on Linux. I use libreoffice and have yet to run into any issues. Unless your employer/class specifically requires something exclusive to Microsoft Office, than it’s not worth the effort to dual-boot for it.
You really don’t. Libreoffice does most things just fine. If you have weird files in your org, run windows in a vm.