My understanding is that it's not really the disrto, but the software running on it that'd effect battery life and performance. Both Debian and Arch can come pretty bare bones on a blank install (Ubuntu and derivatives tend to come with a fair bit of stuff bundled out of the box).

I'd personally reccomend trying a Debian installation (I'd likely say use stable, but testing or sid are also options if you need quicker updates and don't care for flatpak/snap/appimage/distrobox). The installer plays nice with Windows, and you can skip installing a desktop during installation then CLI install a tiling window manager to really minimize 'bloat'.

🧌 NixOS 🧌

I use xmonad/polybar/rofi/alacritty/fish with Home Manager and flakes. You could just use my whole config and have it up and running in a day, deleting lines and adding others. Fork it and modify it to meet your preferences (as I did when I forked this amazingly slick config). I even made a custom typeface to add my favorite crypto logos to my Polybar.

Do you really need to dual boot for office?

I’m doing fine compatibility wise with the OnlyOffice flatpak. If you have a school account with Microsoft perhaps the PWA for Word, etc. will meet your needs.

For a laptop distro with a good tiling DE out of the box you might enjoy Pop!_OS.

Add tlp package for battery life. And any major distro should be fine really

pop os?

specifically battery life for my University classes

try undervolting your CPU/GPU. That was the first thing I did when I got my thinkpad and it improved the thermals and battery life significantly.

Pop Os.

In terms of optimization, Gentoo is the best you're gonna get, but the word "convenience" makes me hesitant to recommend it to you.

Arch is minimal, and has many resources/guides on battery optimization (Especially for ThinkPads), but if you'd like to learn something else, Void is the way to go.

If you're looking for a tiling WM, I can wholeheartedly recommend bspwm. Lots of control and customization, but pretty easy to configure when you understand it. Just know, it might be a hard change going from stacking to tiling.

Why not something like Debian Testing?

Yes, the best distro I always recommend is Fedora Silverblue, especially the KDE version: Fedora Kinoite. I hate this naming scheme though.

Sadly Fedora is controlled by Red Hat and it may get killed off soon.

Debian is solid. You probably don't want to have to fuck around on a laptop that you're using primarily for getting shit done. Flatpaks can handle most of the extra shit you'd want to use. That said, I used to be an Arch guy for years too, and if you're comfortable with it, it's fine to use, but you'll run into the same kind of annoyances. Not true breakage usually, but eventually I got tired of having new surprise bugs in shit that was working fine before.

Also I can't be sure, but I suspect Wayland is probably better on energy draw since it should be more efficient. Maybe try sway for your twm?

If you absolutely must use MS Office, and don't want to use any of the alternatives like LibreOffice that use the exact same file types, why not just run MS Office with Bottles? If that's the only reason for a dual boot, you probably don't need to dual boot.

Some thinkpads have official support for Ubuntu by the manufacturer (lenovo), which means battery optimizations out of the box, amongst other things. Might be relevant for your laptop.

I've been using Fedora on my Dell XPS and it's been great. Opensuse Tumbleweed was also fantastic.

Fedora and Debian are good choices. I've been using Fedora for more than 7 years and it's still going. Very stable like Debian yet up-to-date packages.

Popos. Surprised no one has said it.

Arch is a barebones distro so it makes sense that you have one of the best battery life.

My old 2012 dell laptop is running Arch and so far : the battery which has been used extensively boasts ~2:30 of uptime (on KDE, no less!) compared to Win10 which has only ~1:25 or Fedora which gives me a meager ~1:15.

I cannot tell for OpenSuse because for whatever reason I can't even boot it on this PC. It was my main go-to distro before 2012.

Debian is also solid. I get almost ~2h of uptime.

I have also used Zorin OS which is nice but rather slow on older hardwares.

So overall go for Arch (again), Debian or take a wild guess at NixOS.

I liked using fedora Sway spin on my Dell XPS 13. Sway because it let's you utilise the screen space well and fedora spin because it came working out of the box, you can use it in any distro really.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed FTW. I've got an old T530 (2012) who's been happily on Tumbleweed since 2019.

Nowadays I use vanilla Gnome but had a very good experience with Awesome on the same setup. You may want to check the default Sway setup too.

fedora with gnome (fedora workspaces) is what i use rn :) used the xfce flavor, kde plasma one, and neither of them gave me everything i desired out of them like gnome did. gnome seems to have the leaast amount of small graphical bugs. also fedora is the shit overall, top 3 distros for sure.

I don't necessarily want to use Arch, want to try something new that I don't have to rely on AUR updates for certain software

That's literally the only relevant criterion. Search flathub for those packages, if they're not up there, search the repos of every major distro.

Fedora sway spin is also worth a look

If you are familiar with Arch, you can use arch on your laptop. You can consider Garuda Linux which is arch with a graphical installer, preconfigured DE and WM plus confirmation and maintenance tools. They also have a PacMan repository called Chaotic-AUR: a repository with huge selection of precompiled air packages. They have - among others - Wayfire, Sway, i3WM and Qtile editions. You can try them out from a live usb and see what you think.

Try the 'tlp' command on whatever distro you end up with. It really help with battery optimization. I'm a big Linux mint fan all of my laptops have always had it never had any compatability or driver issues with mint. Something I would maybe recommend is buying some external thinkpad batteries for the laptop off the internet. Else you can buy a big rechargeable car jumper batter pack with 12vdc car output and a car plug charger for laptop.

I guess you can run fedora if you want full features of a laptop. Im currently running LMDE5, is rock solid for me this past 2+ years, upgraded seamlessly from LMDE4. I guess LMDE6 will be released soon after LM 21.2 is released. I do think that at the end of the day , whatever you choose, you can change your desktop environment so it suites you.