I tried for a while, and running it natively really hammered the battery, got nowhere close to the same uptime as when running macOS. Running it in a VM was OK on battery, but of course there's CPU/RAM overhead, and the trackpad _feels_ nice, but it still doesn't quite move in the right way.

when using powertop on my MBP 2014 I can get 7-8 hours of battery.

What’s the catch? If powertop is so good why isnt’t it built into distros?

The tweaks don't always work without any issues: speakers make static or USB ports get disabled even with wireless mice, for example. Distros don't want to cause problems like this.

> If powertop is so good why isnt’t it built into distros?

well, it's usually just an `apt install` or `pacman -S` away. I don't think that distros are optimized for laptop use cases.

Some distros don't offer a laptop-optimized build explicitly. But many times this is because the optimization is performed as an automated step during the installation process.

That said, some popular distros do offer laptop modes during install. Off the top of my head, I think Ubuntu and Gentoo do.

Oh that'd be enough for me, I'll give it a go.

What about the trackpad though? Of course the hardware feel is the same and great, but it doesn't move quite right, like it does with macOS, or you would with a mouse.