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