u/Otterworldly-Ottuk

Hey y'all. I'm in the market for a new laptop and plan to run Fedora or Arch (or i guess whatever distro turns out to be most efficient). I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for a modern laptop with good battery life. I found a post from ThePrimeAgen on Twitter claiming decent battery life on the new Dell XPS 14 with Omarchy, but he doesn't specify configuration or anything (plus i don't want to use Omarchy). I also looked at the Framework laptops but it seems like those are pushed out to Nov/Dec and I'd need something a little quicker (this is replacing a MB Pro).

To give an idea of my use case, I'd basically just be watching videos and web browsing with a touch of logging in to FF14 sometimes for very basic tasks (crafting/chatting) and saving anything heavy for my desktop. Battery life is my big feature as I want to be able to carry it around the house and not be attached to the wall.

I'd be very very appreciative of any recommendations. Thank you!

Hey y'all. I'm in the market for a new laptop and plan to run linux (Fedora or Arch, most likely). I was wondering if there were any experiences with the new 2026 lineup and battery life. I found a post from ThePrimeAgen on Twitter claiming decent battery life on Omarchy, but he doesn't specify configuration or anything (plus i don't want to use Omarchy).

If anyone has a 2026 XPS laptop and runs Linux on it, I'd be very very appreciative if you could share your battery life performance with it. Thank you!

Hello! I'm looking to get into building my system with my own choices, kind of like what you can do in the Arch install process. However, there's no resources out there that tell you what packages are recommended for particular functionality.

For example, the Arch wiki will tell you to pacstrap the kernel, headers, etc.. but it doesnt really tell you what you should include during the pacstrap or after the fact in terms of packages you'd need to have a usable desktop experience like cups (for printing), networkmanager (for wifi), etc. It tells you what is required for the distribution to boot and function as a baseline, but nothing about making it a full desktop experience.

And I'm having the same issue with things like niri and other window managers. What packages are missing that Niri/Noctalia doesn't cover to create a fully functioning modern desktop like app launchers, cliphoard history, etc?

The goal here is for me to learn what packages are commonly used and why for desktop usage so I'm trying to not install a full desktop environment that just includes it all in one big swoop. It's more of a learning experience on how to build from the ground up, with the end result being a fully functioning desktop. I'm just having a hard time understanding where to go after learning the baseline.

Any help or pointing in the right direction would be super appreciated