I have an old X201 with OpenBSD. My setup on that machine is deliberately "gimped" with all ads and most JS blocked to make webpages load acceptably fast, and with the `apmd` enabled and hw.setperf at 10-20.
With a 3rd party 9-cell battery, I can easily get 4.5-5 hours runtime like this. I think the biggest power draw at this point is the display, since it's an older and less energy efficient panel.
Granted, most of my usage is either SSH'ing into another machine or X11 forwarding apps from another machine. I think with hw.setperf dialed up, SMT enabled, and the blockers turned off I'd be lucky to get 45 minutes of runtime...
I've switched to Alpine Linux for anything with a battery. OpenBSD ran very well on my X220, X230, and T430 but there's a 2-3 hour difference in battery life during normal usage that's hard to pass up.
If you've never played around with Alpine, check it out! You'll find the installer... very familiar!
X201 i5?
I installed OpenBSD latest on mine and was impressed by the battery life contre toute attente.
Fvwm with some essential tray apps and we're good!
If Jupyter Lab ran on this setup, I'd be a total convert.
In terms of hardware, I installed coreboot and replaced the wlan with something modern from China. I plan to upgrade from 2 GB to 8 GB but hard to find compatible SO-DIMM these days. It would be bloody awesome to upgrade the display to FHD but that looks... complicated, we'll see.
But I love working with an OS where I understand everything.
Very nice! It's impressive how much can be squeezed out of these Thinkpads. I daily drove an X230 until earlier this year, it's only a bit faster than the X201 and I basically used it in the same capacity - a jump box to other machines. The keyboards and form factors of these laptops are top tier though.
With a 3rd party 9-cell battery, I can easily get 4.5-5 hours runtime like this. I think the biggest power draw at this point is the display, since it's an older and less energy efficient panel.
Granted, most of my usage is either SSH'ing into another machine or X11 forwarding apps from another machine. I think with hw.setperf dialed up, SMT enabled, and the blockers turned off I'd be lucky to get 45 minutes of runtime...
Either way, not bad for a "museum" computer :)