The need to tweak that deeply just to get “baseline” performance really stings, though, particularly if you’re not already accustomed to having to do that kind of thing.

It’d be a gargantuan project, but there should probably be some kind of centralized, cross-distro repository for power configuration profiles that allows users to rate them with their hardware. Once a profile has been sufficiently user-verified and is well rated, distro installers could then automatically fetch and install the profile as a post-install step, making for a much more seamless and less fiddly experience for users.