People was using Weston with Intel Laptops as it used less power many years ago. Samsung was using Fedora+Wayland for Watches and TV’s i was thinking Arch or Fedora for a new AMD laptop?
If it is new, assuming a relatively recent CPU and adequate RAM, it hardly matters.
If you want optimized power then just dig into it and configure and fiddle around with settings yourself. And then the distro does not matter.
First, that your laptop is AMD does not matter at all for choosing a distro or a DE. There are no distros which are optimized for certain CPUs, unless you are compiling the kernel yourself. I don’t understand why you’re repeating it’s an AMD laptop.
But anyway, the less processes opened and the less power hungry those processes are, the better for your battery. So go for something minimalistic, Arch might be a good option but depends on your technical knowledge.
Alpine is probably king for a distro that’s lightweight, the problem is that it isn’t really thought for desktop usage, but it’s an option if you wanted to.
I’d recommend to just install your favorite distro and then run “systemctl status” and disable every background service that you won’t need. I recommend disabling Bluetooth if you aren’t going to use it.
After that, install one of those programs that limit your CPU clock by default, since I doubt most of the time you will be needing maximum power anyway. If you aren’t going to need the maximum speed of your CPU and want to get the maximum battery life out of your laptop, underclocking the CPU in the BIOS is a great option.
I’ve been using Fedora KDE on a 5625U on my new laptop, gives me about 5 hours.
I use this program auto-cpufreq with the “Powersave” setting and that gives me about 7 hours with barely noticeable performance degredation.
I have an Intel only 13" laptop with 1440p screen. It has a 46 wah battery. I put Ubuntu on it and it lasts forever. Checking with powertop, it idles at around 4.5 - 5 watts at 30% brightness (I don’t like my screen to be too bright) and it goes up to 10 - 12 watts when I’m running a browser then dips down again once the browser is loaded up. I don’t know how they do it and ON GNOME (which is known to sip so much power), but they do and I’m liking it.
I went Fedora. Haven’t regretted it.
I vote for voidlinux - I have no idea why, but I get almost double the battery life compared to fedora. No doubt it’s something stupid I’ve done on fedora but - I just love void.
The Off screen. ;)
The screen uses the most power out of any other piece if thr system, for daily use (on laptops which supported driversets for the OS)
Just turn the brightness down, and that will save you more battery life than tinkering with anything, unless you know a specific piece of the system (nvidia gpu) is killing your battery life.
