If it is new, assuming a relatively recent CPU and adequate RAM, it hardly matters.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Newer Kernels have power saving features also stuff H264 etc.
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.
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 went Fedora. Haven't regretted it.
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.
ON GNOME (which is known to sip so much power)
Is there actual evidence to back this up¿? I have used endeavour OS, openSuse and fedora silverblue/kinoite with gnome and kde when I was distrohopping recently and I found that battery life is the same irrespective of DE. Fedora and endeavour last between 5:30 and 6 hours while openSuSe lasted around 5 hours irrespective of whether I was using kde or gnome
Not sure what evidence you're looking for or how I can present it. I was a gnome user for a long time and it just sips power much more than all other distros. I don't know, look it up online? Read some posts from Reddit? Lol There was talks about improving it and it looks like it HAS improved, hence my Ubuntu comment. I believe Wayland has something to do with it, too, since it scales hi res screens better than xorg
Yes I have seen posts about and users claim it. But I have never seen hard numbers to prove it. I searched for articles or videos in which they perform from battery tests with kde and gnome but I found absolutely nothing. I actually measured it when I was distrohopping and found no difference so I see no reason to believe those people when I have my numbers.
it looks like it HAS improved, hence my Ubuntu comment. I believe Wayland has something to do with it, too, since it scales hi res screens better than xorg
Maybe this is true. All my testing was recent because I had a new laptop and was figuring out what I wanted to install on it. Wayland version of both kde and gnome were what I use. Also I remember fractional scaling on gnome under x11 came with a warning of extra battery and CPU+GPU resource usage.
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.
The Off screen. ;)
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.