The only thing that is stopping me to jump to a linux laptop is battery life. MacOs is just optimised to a crazy extent. Nothing really comes close to the same battery performance if you don't want to get your hands dirty with tlp.
- Undervolted the CPU (-100mV). - Using bumblebeed/bbswitch to switch between GPUs, I never use the discrete GPU but I'm glad it's there just in case. - Show power consumption (watts) on my status bar to keep an eye for power hungry websites - Using Arch so it doesn't have anything I don't need running out of the box. A bit harder to install and configure though. I'm actually not sure if this helps or not - Disabled Xorg compositor, yeah, I don't get window shadows and there's a weird flicker when I switch desktops but it gives me an extra 10~15% battery life.
There's also a utility called "powertop" that gives you stats about power consumption and a bunch of levers to improve it.
It took me a few days to set everything up but now I'm in love with the mobility.
AFAIK the WiFi hardware doesn't use much power itself, although I might guess that background protocol chitchat could cause CPU usage. I think that when I am usually using WiFi I am also usually using a browser that chews power.
But this is something Apple does right. My wife noticed that she can get around 50% more battery life out of her Macbook using Safari instead of Firefox. (7-8 hours instead of 4-5).
I always go with the defaults, so my hands get dirty by:
`apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw`
That's it - by default it starts, and is enabled to come up on boot. Works for me, and I far prefer Linux, even on my Macbook Air
But nothing other than Linux will ever be installed on my other laptops. I moved away from Windows as my main OS in the early 2000's to never look back.