Are Linux applications going to use a lot of battery? Do they have wakelocks or something similar?
It is still an issue, but it's getting better. As far as I am concerned, Ring-KDE (a phone and Skype alternative app) is still eating too much power. It is a work in progress and is already much better than it was a couple months ago. Some of the dependencies my app use are also power hungry. This needs to be fixed. However it's nothing that can't be fixed. Enough profiling and powertop work will get us there.
>Ring-KDE (a phone and Skype alternative app) is still eating too much power.
This will always be a nature of Ring and Tox because it uses DHT network to find peers and keep connections alive, this is CPU-hungry, therefore power consuming and it won't be accepted on mobile platforms. Also losing network connectivity for 3 seconds causes the client to reconnect to the network, find peers again, messages can be lost... Matrix is the way to go.