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
That's great to hear another linux success story!
Just a handy tip if you haven't already your laptop might sound like it's about to take off because it hasn't been cleaned in a while. Just search up a tutorial on YouTube for your laptop and be amazed at how much dust you will find clogging up your fan.
Also yeah that terminal thing is just arch and hyprland you really through yourself in the deep end there (I personally havnt used arch before). Linux mint on the other hand is super easy to use and the terminal is only there if you chose to use it.
In the end I'm learning how everything works "behind the scenes" with a shock therapy (disclaimer: while I didn't use Linux as my personal desktop, I have a decade of experience with Linux servers, otherwise this migration would have been impossible to understand for me)
I was expecting for example an easy toggle for dark mode instead needs to set several constants on the terminal (for GTK, for qt, and so on)
Everything needs one hour of searching but I'm documenting everything for future reference in a markdown file
And I had to set home as a git repository because otherwise a literal comma in a wrong spot would crash everything and I wouldn't be able to revert it
For example I wanted to show the WiFi status on the taskbar (default doesn't show) and I forgot a comma in the JSON configuration file. The taskbar (waybar) didn't even start next time and I was presented with a completely empty wallpaper lol