So I’m looking for a distro that I can put on my laptop in addition to kde neon and boot into when I want to save battery. The thing is I’m not even sure if I can expect a noticeable difference or if the display and applications I want to use (mostly just basic office stuff and maybe a browser but I want to use this in the forest so I won’t have wifi anyway) already draw so much power that background processes don’t really matter. If you think they do then I’d like to hear about especially efficient distros. I’m not a poweruser though so anything that requires extensive setup or maintainance won’t work for me sadly. I was thinking maybe something like kanotix that loads to RAM but like I said I’m not sure if that actually saves power.
It’s a good topic to raise, laptop battery life is definitely still a weak point on Linux. I’m not sure there’s any distro specifically geared towards extending battery life, but maybe choosing one with a light desktop environment would help? I’m no expert myself but it also depends on the device you’re using and it’s platform.
For example, one common power management tool tlp https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html is not recommended by AMD or Framework for my FW13. There are steps you can take, like ensuring your browser is using the GPU/iGPU for videos/hardware acceleration is enabled and working, but Linux as a whole does not seem to have prioritised improving battery life. It’s understandable to a degree, with it being dependent on so many factors