It requires lots of manual control but from my experience I can match or exceed battery life in comparison to running windows, with some tweaking. Out of the box it was terrible as well.
I ran Linux solely from 1997 to 2004 on the desktop and switched back because it was such a pain in the ass to manage. Every time I go back, it just isn’t catching up to the mainstream OSs’ ability to manage without “futzing”.
My M2 currently lasts all day on the battery while spending half of it on conference calls and half of it writing code. Nothing can match that right now, but I am still hopeful for a Linux future.
They are not! Not even close!
I think this is where a lot of the negative opinion of Linux comes from, people lament some issue they have with their Mac and someone else will say, "oh you should try Linux, it's really good now." And so they do and are surprised to find that experience is vastly different.
Linux is a great choice for people who want the highest degree of control and freedom over how they interact with their computer. The trade-off is that sometimes you have to futz with it or report bugs.
If you view your computer strictly as a tool to let you get other things done, then you want Mac. All of the OS and UX decisions have been made for you and you get what you get, but you (should) never have to tinker with the system itself.
But! I believe System76 should ship their laptops with tools and/or settings and/or configs for other mainline distributions that maximize the experience on their hardware while allowing for the inherent customization Linux-based distributions.
I’d argue Sys76 is far closer to Apple than just installing Linux on a random machine.
> It’s just that nobody seems to care about Linux’s “out of the box” default configuration
The only possible way this would work OOB is if the OEM or the community maintained OOB settings for each hardware variant.
Heck, I was recently shopping PC laptops and would see variations in CPU OEMs (AMD vs Intel) for the same model.
Everyone I know that is stuck in big corporate OS spend more time than that every week fighting something their masters push on them.
Application install is a terminal command that's trivially easy to learn, there's no e-shop solution with ads and surveillance, and while I use i3wm I think most people would be about as comfortable in XFCE as in the MICROS~1 OS:es of yesteryears. You decide when to upgrade, there are no nagscreens or forced reboots.
At least for the last five years or so I've had no trouble with UEFI, WLAN or sound.
It's the basic things like not having to install third party utilities to have window centric window management (as opposed to app centric window management). Or being able to plug my Android phone in and be able to browse the files without additional utilities.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTw...
But generally powertop is enough for a significant boost. For certain manufacturers (ASUS is a good example), you want to use their vendor specific tools to manage CPU/GPU powerbands.
https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuni...
Two of my last five laptops were macs, three linux boxes, if you consider corporate laptops as "mine". One of the three linux laptops just worked beautifully (wrt. battery and other driver issues), one didn't at all, and one worked poorly until I installed some software that shouldn't matter for battery lifetime, and since then it's had excellent battery management. There was a long list of dependencies, so I suspect that the software I installed depended on a package that solved whatever the problem was.
You may chance to buy hardware where someone really has tested and fixed linux. Or you may get something else.
FYI: The two good ones are some Huawei thing that weighs 1.3kg and a GPD P2 Max, a tiny toy, really portable, https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/hardware/attovax