Similar experience over here on one of the earlier 11th gen models and recently on a new 12th gen model as well (build quality feels a lot improved vs the early stuff too, fyi). People are still right to call BS on having to run any of this to get decent battery performance but it is possible to get if you jump through a few hoops. Next step for distros should really be sane defaults for this stuff and/or an option to tell the installer it's going on a laptop/non workstation desktop so that it gets sane defaults for the laptop based on efficiency per watt rather then the sane defaults for a server/workstation (max performance).