Yea. I just installed Mint 20 Xfce next to Debian. I think it’s great. But I’ll leave Debian. I kind of just sometimes feel that I want to try something new, something different. But I think I’d never use something like Gnome or KDE, too bloated… at least for me. I think Mint is better than Ubuntu.
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Interesting that you went with Mint 20 XFCE . I’m certainly less than happy with the performance of Mint 20 Cinnamon.
This is very annoying. There are some serious bugs in Debian testing/sid. dt crashes and tears the whole system down and sometimes poweroff/reboot fails, too. It’s probably some failed Intel hardware bugfix.
Looks like I am going back to Fedora. Intel Neo does not work on Manjaro… I’d like to stick to something Debian based but… bumblebee does not work on Ubuntu. Maybe MX?
I will do some tests on Debian stable but I think there is no way to switch off the Nvidia card when it is not needed, and bumblebee does not work with the original nvidia driver
nvidia on demand (nvidia prime) does not work well apparently on ubuntu, the fan is basically always on
I used Arch Linux for many years, but recently I got a new PC and installed openSUSE Tumbleweed. darktable works very well on both distros. It works better on my new PC, because I now have a modern video card (nVidia RTX 2060) that implements openCL.
I’m running Kubuntu 20.04 with the latest Nvidia drivers from the Ubuntu repo and nvidia-prime ondemand works fine for me. Or at least: the fan is not running at full speed, and plasma/X.org does not uses the GPU but darktable does (without explicitly asking before running). I can’t say if power consumption is low or not because my battery is mostly dead and the power estimations are all over the place.
Maybe is computer (Acer) / GPU (960M) / driver version (450.66) dependent?
Ok, I measured power consumption: On Debian stable with the latest original Nvidia driver, without bumblebee and tlp, the battery life is a little more than 3 hours. That sucks. Display brightness is around 75%. On Ubuntu Mate 20.04, with the same settings but with tlp and Nvidia on demand, I get about 4 hours. That kind of sucks, too. I think it is annoying that I need to restart the whole system if I only want to use the Intel gpu. I am now measuring MX 19.2 with bumblebee.
My laptop is not even 1 year old. I used to get up to 6 hours batterly life with bumblebee on Debian. Or on Windows. But on Windows I cannot really control the fan or switch on off the Nvidia GPU, you know there are those power settings but nobody knows what Windows actually does.
I wonder if it is possible to install the nvidia driver packages from the mx repo on Buster, because those work with bumblebee
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If fedora works best, then perhaps the best for your system?
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I think I will need to do more tests on usb sticks, I can install both Fedora and Buster on a usb stick.
At the moment I am getting decent battery life on MX 19.2, about 500 minutes.
I think it is possible to install bumblebee on Fedora.
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Anna,
Do you have to run the laptop on battery all the time?
What if you have the charger plugged in?
MfG
Claes in Lund, Schweden
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Hi, nice to read form you again 
Claes.
Well… I like to save power and protect nature. And I am a perfectionist, and I don’t need to hear the fan all the time.
well, looks like actually I get more than 6 hours battery life on MX with bumblebee and tlp.
btw, I was able to install Buster on my new laptop by creating a custom buster with the newest kernel with the help of live-build
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Well, you know the thing is: I am kind of used to the Debian/Ubuntu commands and Fedora is different, although I have used Fedora too, but not recently.
If you are getting 6 hours on MX Linux, won’t that be good enough? It could also be that the laptop battery could be losing capacity due to age?
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Well I just tried to install the mx nvidia packages on Buster and it does not work because of dependency issues. However I am thinking about downgrading the kernel in testing/sid to 5.4, because its the 5.7 kernel that probably causes the crash. Maybe I can install a kernel form the buster backports repo?
To save power, I set everything to sleep automatically. If I don’t want the laptop to be on standby, I would do a shutdown. In win10, I use Power Options, where you can control the processor, fan on/off, etc. One could probably script conditional events in win10 or Linux but that would take more effort.
I typically dial things down as much as possible. E.g. I throttle the processor and lower its activity threshold. In win10, say the processor runs from 10-100%, I make it 0-80%. I turn off the fan and let the laptop sleep if it gets too hot. (I take a break too. Healthy policy.) I turn down the screen contrast and brightness. I don’t need to burn holes in my eye sockets. I just have to remember what I did, so I could reverse the settings when I am doing intensive or critical work.
The last item to consider when saving power is to set a timer to your power bar or socket to avoid drawing too much ghost power.
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Abends, Gnädige Anna,
I think that you are making things too complicated.
I understand that you do not like fan noise.
But a laptop has to have fans in order to cool a very tight computer build.
A laptop does create a lot of heat and that heat has to be fanned away.
Are your air outlets clean and free from dust? Nothing hindering the exhaust?
Personally, I hate fan noise. But I have chosen quite a different computer approach:
Given a certain budget, I looked at what was the most oompf computer I could get.
Would that be a laptop? No.
A full-size build-it-yourself stationary, full-tower computer, intended for heavy
gaming and heavy over-clocking was the answer. Money-wise much cheaper
than a laptop. It has five large fans, a GFX with two fans, and watercooling
(with two fans) for the processor.
But here is the trick: I do not over-clock it. I under-clock it, instead.
There still is enough oompf left for heavy image processing.
I am sitting next to it, and I cannot hear the fans, they are virtually silent.
The CPU temperature, after a day’s work, presently is about 34 degrees C
(about 10 degrees C above ambient).
I picked the computer components one-by-one. The GFX I fancied was
an Nvidia (TU116), which turned out to be the major obstacle in finding
a suitable Linux distro. Most of the distros stubbornly refused to boot, since they
defaulted to Nouveau drivers. And so on. Manjaro/KDE was my saviour.
So, after this long tirade,
- do you really need a portable computer?
- starting with the components your computer have: search what distros
and drivers that might be able to work for your special combination.
Viel Spaß!
Claes in Lund, Schweden
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Then the one sitting behind the desk is the hot one. 
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Well, MX has incredible battery life but I found another problem: when the computer is on battery power, it cannot reboot or suspend, maybe not even power off properly. I am not sure what exactly is causing this, but I suspect it’s bumblebee. However it’s quite some work to test this… 
Testing on Fedora and Arch/Manjaro is even more work…
I think bumblebee is causing it because it happens on Debian too, but it does not happen on Ubuntu. I hope it is possible to solve it by going back to an older kernel because this is definitely a recent issue. However it does happen with kernel 5.4, too. Or maybe it’s the newer nvidia driver?
Edit: yes, it’s bumblebee.
Its last commit was in 2013 and there are a few bugs associated with suspend.