> Sure, they try not to
ruin the battery life, but who is investing the amount of engineering resources into Linux battery life that Apple invests into macOS's? No one, of course, because the ROI of doing that for Apple is much higher than doing the same for Linux.
The answer is rather that everyone is doing it. Then most people care about it a little so they do a little, but because it's most people that adds up to being the majority of what needs to be done. A smaller number care about it a lot but all that's left is for them to shave off the rough edges.
> Linux's open nature means that going for SotA battery life does not yield a competitive advantage, so no one does it.
How does it not yield a competitive advantage? If you're Framework, Dell, System76, Canonical, Red Hat, etc., you want people to use your product instead of buying a Mac or some competitor's Windows laptop.
> In other words, centralize the battery life project.
I don't understand how this is centralization.
Suppose Intel does the work to make good open source drivers and make sure their hardware has low idle power consumption, Red Hat does the work to make systemd behave in a way which is power inefficient in the hardware-independent ways, etc. Then Framework does an analysis of where power is going on their systems and finds that Intel and Red Hat did a good job but there's a bug in the third party network controller driver preventing it from going to sleep, so they fix the bug.
Where is the centralization? The work is being done by all different companies who aren't even necessarily interacting with each other. Some of the bugs in third party software are fixed by hobbyists or other vendors. Then Framework is left with a limited amount of work to do and they do it.
The problem comes when they go to do that analysis and find that the thing using more power than it should is a piece of hardware that the vendor both failed to document and failed to provide source code for the firmware, so that no one else can fix it when they don't. In other words, it's caused by a thing that isn't open source.