I have Fedora Workstation on an old Thinkpad T470s touchscreen laptop. I don't use the touchscreen very much but it does work.

I think you will be disappointed by battery life. It is almost always worst on Linux than Windows. Sometimes much worse. Mine get 90-120 minutes. Yeah in 2025. Apple just released a MacBook with 24 hours of battery life.

Doesn't matter too much to me because I almost always have it plugged in, but yeah.

very much appreciated!

I'm specifically trying to bind a button to dpi/sensitivity cycling.

Find device ID with xinput list

Check button mapping with xinput get-button-map

Swap button assignment (eg 8<->9) with xinput set-button-map 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 8

That sounds great. if you don't mind me asking, what model are you using/ what are your laptop's specs?

You bet! If you need any help, the community as a whole is super helpful. I'm a novice but I'm happy to help if I can, or at least try to point you in the right direction if I can't.

Even my 75 year old dad likes it better than windows 11.

thanks! looking into it right now.

100% agree with Thinkpad and Mint. Stock Mint 22.2 is a revelation compared to Windows 11.

It's a cliche but it's true: used Thinkpads are awesome for this. I have a 4 year old Thinkpad running Mint and it's great. Full support for the touch screen, great battery life, and it's damn near indestructible. Not once has it interrupted me with mandatory updates upon reboot. I got it on Craigslist for $100.

I don't know what their touchscreen support is like, but a good place to start looking might be PopOS. That or Ubuntu, since there's a ton of documentation and since Ubuntu supports / is supported by most things

Mint installer uses Btrfs if present and defaults to two volumes. Suse Tumbleweed, cited by the author, defaults to Btrfs (and uses it expertly with each update, to allow rollbacks without affecting user data).

Was this using On-board memory, because my mouse doesn't have any?

I solved a silimar issue by using a virtual machine to set/change the defaults. It isn't totally ideal, but it works. I can give more specifics later if you need 👍

I use Piper for my g600 if thats any help? Not sure if/how it handles dpi tho

Edit; Piper relies on Libratbag

As best as I can tell, it doesn't support anything related to DPI.

You could try input-remapper.

For RGBs checkout openRGB or open razr.

I love btrfs and have a similar partition setup, but I'm not sure if the rest of the setup that'd be required to install into this is going to be good for someone wanting assistance with moving their home directory. in particular likely not being able to use any graphical installers since I don't know any that support installing into subvolumes

depending on how much free space you have on your drive and the size of your home folder, the easiest way would just be to

0. boot into some live image with gparted (basically any live image)
1. use gparted to resize your root and add a new partition for /home
2. copy the whole /home folder contents over to the new partition
3. if you want your existing install to work: edit your fstab to mount the new partition as /home. the arch wiki should have good instructions for this, doesn't matter if you aren't using arch

Damn. I was about to go into whole detail about setups and realized how rusty I am. I've been on arch for about 7 years now and just been super happy with the rolling release. I haven't had to do an install since the last time I bought a laptop and I quit trying to get others on Linux.

But give it some thought. It's really not as hard as others make it seem. Honestly, once you get it installed and setup is probably the easiest. It's very stable. After bouncing around with other distros I'd always run into things that irked me.

Just follow the wiki and you're golden.

As far as your partitions, I use to create a data partition that was the bulk of the free data. Then cut a megabyte out 10 times to create ten partitions. Those will basically be placeholder partitions.

So for instance, I now have a 999 gig data partition and 10 placeholder partitions. When I'm ready to create a swap partition, I move 5 gigs (from the ass end of the data partition) to the 11th partition. Then I move 30 gigs or so to the 10th partition for my root arch partition. And so on. You could move 30 to 50 gigs to the 9th partition and drop Fedora there and then OpenSUSE to the 8th partition. This makes it easier to jump back and forth without reinstalling and reinstalling. And all the while you can keep customizing each distro until you just get comfortable with one that keeps you most interested. (Maybe even drop Debian in the 7th partition for more familiarity with other based distros).

I've quit creating home partitions because I would get conflicts between distros and I honestly don't know how people handle that. I just use my data partition for storage.

Get comfortable with the dd command for copying your ISO, and MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU DO THE COMMANDS IN CORRECT ORDER with dd! Actually, don't get comfortable. I ALWAYS look up the correct order and don't even try to act like I remember.

I don't know if this is helping at all. It's late. I'm going to sleep.

Update:

So for your case, I would cut from partition 4. Create a logical partition (if that's still a thing). Make the first partition of logical partition your data partition. Then cut from that like explained above.

I literally did something similar and wrote a long ass post yesterday : https://lemmy.world/post/37274818?scrollToComments=true

We have different goals, but one takeaway to try is to rip mint to shreds before installing over it, that way you might get the hang of installing something the way you might need to before needing to.

Also, try some things that aren't what you are sure you want just to see if you actually don't like them or to reinforce your confidence in what you want. If you're spinning things up and tearing them down, you lose nothing but time, but can learn new things.

Resize your partition to free up some space for a new partition. You will have to shrink the filesystem and then the partition. Install Linux on the new partition. Once installed, you can mount the old drive and set it up to mount as /home

Then clean things up a bit.

Assuming you used LUKS, you will have to know your passphrase to mount the encrypted drive.

Once you have a /home separate from your boot partition, it is a lot easier to distro-hop.

Resizing is a bit risky though. If you can afford even a small SSD, installing to that and then mounting /home is safer.

I really am glad if you want to distro hop, I have done it many times. Play around, really try to see what the developers intended. It is a learning curve.

But speaking from my own experience, I am not too technically gifted and I enjoyed trying new things but I kept coming back to Mint. I feel there is nothing wrong if you come back. It's like life, don't be scared of trying new things, try, but nothing wrong if you know what you like and come back to it, even if it is a bit boring.

But experiment, go mad, my point I wanted to make is the worst case is you have a nice distro to fall back to.

Yeah, since I'm between 2 distros, Live USB would save time. My touchpad was always a special case with Mint 21, so hardware check is my main concern. I don't do anything else that word break either.