The power management app that comes with KDE/Plasma does a pretty good job with my laptop battery, certainly no worse than Windows did. It throttles back the CPU, dims the screen depending partly on user activity, has sensible policies and notifications for stretching out that last 10% of the battery. It also allows apps to request an exception from power management. What's wrong with the current OSS PM tools?
In my experience, the most effective power management tool on any device is actually just airplane mode.