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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

After installing Arch / Gnome on my laptop last week, I can see why. Everything works completely fine and feels 3X faster than Windows 11. I have Linux on my desktop machine but always hesitated for laptops due to past bad experiences with power management (i.e. something always eventually went wrong when closing the lid). So far, all of that is working perfectly.

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Windows 11 is exceptionally slow. I installed it on a ThinkPad Carbon X1, it was quite unusable. Unresponsive after starting up, copilot and O365 trying to run stuff and i had to wait for them to comolete. I was very surprised that they think this is acceptable. I spent about an hour going through processes and installed programs list, and uninstalling many things. At that point it was more tolerable.

You pretty much need Windhawk to fix and remove all of Windows 11's poor design and architecture.

There are still issues. Just going with your example, see the threads in the Framework forum around lid close issues (almost all from Linux users): https://community.frame.work/search?q=lid%20close

Reports about high battery drain, suspend issues and similar exist as well.

I'm running Fedora on a Framework laptop, but with the awareness that it can require some tinkering.

Current battery life is better than it was on Windows. I know Windows is very good from this standpoint but things always degrade over time. That is my expectation with arch as well - good now but let's see how it is 6 months from now. That is always the real test. Regardless, my laptop is too small to run Windows + WSL so will probably stick with just running Linux.

Arch Linux is an eternal OS, it can migrate through different hardware and there are people who never reinstall it (you don’t need to) for, say, a decade. Mine is half a decade at least, and went through three laptops. The last one was (Intel) MacBook Pro dying on me (the keys), and I just rsynced my system onto another MacBook (booted with Arch install) via ssh. Took me an hour or two in the background. I left my home and returned to a working laptop that needed a few tiny changes in configs here and there.

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