My first Linux experience was on a garbage-picked laptop I got for free because it had broken power management on Windows
I think in its case, the hardware was somehow damaged and Linux just fell back to APM instead of ACPI, so the technical details are different
but there's something nostalgic and funny to me about the prospect that this kind of thing could become a pattern :)
> a common 5-year-old laptop
doesn't mean 'a 5-year-old Mac laptop'.
The point isn't about macOS, but the proposed standard. It's this: if working on whatever random piece of hardware you happen to have lying around is a requirement for being a viable desktop operating system, macOS is not a viable desktop operating system... but of course, macOS is not only viable as a desktop OS but quite successful in its niche. So this tells us that the proposed standard is no standard at all— running without any tweaks or compromises on random hardware which was not designed, marketed, or sold as compatible is not necessary for a desktop OS to viable or a reasonable choice or whatever.
(And as a sibling poster to you points out, in the case of older hardware, it's a test that Windows may sometimes fail as well, if for entirely different reasons.)
It will likely be many years before the year of the Linux laptop.
My understanding of the situation is that manufacturers tend to work really hard with Microsoft on graceful power management code, and until that effort is replicated on Linux (lol), one has to chase down specific hardware, because otherwise it generally sucks.
That being said, he nVidia GPU managed to suck the battery in 2-3 hours depending on the game being payed under Windows as well, everything around 4 hours on normal working is fine.
Installing software under Linux / Ubuntu is, well, strange. But solvable. And I really do like the old-school, non-cloud feeling of Linux way better than Windows 10 and One Drive.