I bought a Lenovo laptop, one from the the bargain bin, 11th gen Intel and 8gb soldered RAM

Even if I reinstalled Windows to make sure all the bloatware was removed, it was almost unusable. At boot I was left with only 800mb free memory, and “Lenovo vantage” kept reappearing automatically like malware. (It’s a useless electron app that wastes half a gig of ram to show you on screen when you press caps lock, check driver updates and try to upsell you on extended warranty)

At idle the machine was as loud as a jet, with crystal disk mark always complaining “the nvme drive is over 65°C!!” (I’m guessing from the constant swapping)

Battery life was a disaster, 2 hours at idle with no foreground apps open

I thought that it was the CPU too slow for my use and the RAM not enough, so I was planning to spend some hundreds of euro to buy a new laptop with at least 16gb of RAM.

Then I installed cachyos and because I’m masochist I chose hyprland at the “easy” install screen that asks you which of the 19 available DE you prefer.

After a week of suffering trying to understand all the text configuration files for everything (it was a shock, everything needs the terminal) I’m now getting used to it and… It’s like I got a brand new laptop???

Memory: clean boot now obviously is reversed situation. I don’t have only 800mb of free RAM, the whole system uses only 800mb

Temperatures: by default cachyos is set to show the CPU temperature on waybar, and it’s always around 40-45° C. The fan is way quieter. At idle they can even stop, before they were like a hair dryer even after a clean boot

Battery life: astounding. I can’t believe that I can use it for a whole afternoon. Accidentally fell asleep and when I came back after two hours it lost only 10% (on idle, screen turn off automatically)

Gaming performance: tried only with casual games but with something like tinytopia I get 60fps on ultra when on windows it was choppy on high

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    1·
    14 minutes ago

    Linux on old laptops is a joy. I spent my morning on an old MacBook Pro that I found on the recycled electrons bench when I dropped off some bottles. Runs great (Niri instead of Hyprland but similar).

  • Zak@lemmy.world
    3·
    3 hours ago

    I’ve used Linux as my primary OS for many years, but I keep a copy of Windows on my current laptop for gaming. I know the gaming story on Linux is pretty good now, but having to hibernate and reboot is enough of a barrier to launching a game that it helps me stay more productive.

    At home, my laptop sits on a stand with great airflow, but when trying to play The Witcher 3 on a desk while traveling, it overheated and throttled to the point it wasn’t playable. On Linux, the thinkpad_acpi driver allows setting the fan level to “disengaged”, which sounds like “off” but actually means unregulated and results in a considerably higher speed and cooling performance than the usual maximum. Some research led to the conclusion that while manual fan control is possible with certain apps on Windows, there is no way to exceed the maximum automatic speed.

    It only took a couple minutes to set up Lutris and Proton to run the game, and as expected the mild abuse of my laptop’s fan does make it playable. What I didn’t expect is considerably faster load times, but I got those too.

  • Mordikan@kbin.earth
    11·
    7 hours ago

    Almost every laptop I’ve owned in the past 15 years has been this way. Just an old machine people wanted to discard because of viruses or crap performance. They’d give their “junk” to me and go buy a new laptop. After swapping it to linux with a few tweaks here and there, I swear that “junk” would outperform the new one they dropped all the money on.

  • xmanmonk@lemmy.sdf.org
    17·
    14 hours ago

    It’s always good to hear another success story about saving a machine with Linux. Congratulations!

    • AirBreather@lemmy.world
      12·
      10 hours ago

      The “only 800mb of free RAM” was a reference to how much Windows was consuming before the switch to Linux

  • Tundra@sh.itjust.works
    9·
    15 hours ago

    cachyOS is great, it feels like its tailored to your system with all the tweaks and v3 support.

    And if you choose the btrfs option with limine - you also get automatic snapshots in the bootloader.

  • neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    14 hours ago

    I have the L 14 GEN two so it’s probably the same processor and I don’t know if my eight GB is salted or not but I was able to upgrade to 16 GB anyway I noticed that in Lennox I get significantly better battery life. It probably goes from 2 to 3 hours to 4 to 5 maybe.

    • Rhonda Sandtits@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      3 hours ago

      Your L14 has one soldered ram module and one socketed module which is why you could upgrade it.

      It’s the “s” versions of the thinkpads that have non-upgradeable ram:

      T490 - socketed ram, upgradeable
      T490s - soldered ram, non-upgradeable
      T14 - socketed ram, upgradeable
      T14s - soldered ram, non-upgradeable
      etc etc

      Im not sure about the amd thinkpads as there are some models where the intel version has socketed ram whereas the amd version of the same laptop has fully soldered ram.
      The s versions are slightly smaller and lighter