This is where looking at the gaming centric distros and doing what they do makes sense. I haven't seen all kernel settings for all distros, but my understanding is many choose the defaults and most of the defaults are more optimized for server usage. Which makes sense. Debian's biggest deployment environment is a fleet of servers. For the standard Debian Install, of course. However, my laptop is not a server, so the defaults don't make sense. This is where we maybe need distros that their whole niche is to be laptop friendly. Or, get the bigger distros, to offer a flavor with a different set of defaults for laptop environments.