Mine was once drenched completely in hot sweet latte and once submerged in mineral water (don't ask how...) It still works with no issues even though both times I had to disassemble completely and wash all parts including motherboard. The mineral water got between lcd leaves so I had to separate, wash and dry individual layers of LCD.

My tip is to always have IPA, distilled water and tools to disassemble and clean your laptop.

How do you wash electronic components without causing damage?

Most boards can be washed safely but there are some components that can be damaged.

Safest method is to use distilled, deoxygenated water (aka electronic water) to remove most contaminants, followed by 99% isopropyl alcohol or 96% ethyl alcohol to remove the rest and also water.

Don't skimp on water and alcohol, submerge the board and use brush while submerged, to pull and dilute contaminants.

Just never use tap or mineral water. You can use regular distilled water as long as you do it quickly, but unless it is deoxygenated it will be corroding so don't leave it in water for long.

Alcohol is there mostly to dilute water so that it dries out very quickly. Without alcohol water could stay under components for a long time and kill or damage your board.

Alcohols can damage some plastic components, so don't keep it in alcohol fo too long, either.

Water is not instantly harmful to unpowered electronics, especially distilled water. Just make sure there's no power and go to town.

I would add that washing with water is normal part of board production. Fluxes are designed to be water soluble and a lot of fluxes are washed with water with addition of saponifiers.

It is also normal to wash a board in ultrasonic cleaner after any rework or at the end of production process (especially in small scale production).

Is it really worth your time?

Depends. If you decide it is not possible for you to spill on your laptop or the loss of your laptop is worth less than half a day of your time and keeping two bottles one of clean water and one of clean alcohol, then sure, just ignore this.

On the other hand if you own an expensive machine that can be reasonably disassembled (ie. almost anything else than a Mac) and you plan to use it for a long time and you don't have any other insurance against spill, then you might be able to save a lot of money with a very small amount of effort.

My laptop was fully beefed up Lenovo T440s and I live in Poland. In Poland, this laptop represented about 3-4 average monthly salaries. Not much compared to half a day of effort to disassemble, clean and reassemble again.

Half a day assumes you have no idea what you are doing and you are need extra time to figure out what to do, find videos on Internet, figure out why you can't pull a part and what still keeps it in place, etc.

For a person that knows what they are doing this is half an hour of effort.

There's also a big risk of repair going wrong. But you're right: I was judging the situation from the SV bubble.

What distro and laptop do you use currently?

It's indeed annoying. More so that it generally is solved but is to be found somewhere in the fragmented linux ecosystem.

I had no issues with my laptop and it worked better than windows which turns it into a jetengine for some reason except for bluetooth earbuds for which i needed a fork of pulseaudio or so....

Right now I'm back to osx but I'm really missing a good tiling manager like i3wm. As for the future I'm looking at system76 desktops, but still undecided (especially since apple's m1 hardware)

That horrible battery life on Ubuntu on an XPS 13 sounds like something else wrong. Several of my coworkers are running exactly that (over different generations even) and it's been with no tweaks.