Edit: on the other hand, computers do start up a heck of a lot faster than they used to.
At least in Windows you aren't at a TTY that echos everything to the screen by default until PAM has hauled itself (and its umpteen libraries) off the disk (yes people still have 5400RPM HDDs :D), initialized, and put the terminal into no-echo mode...
I don't know much about the situation on Windows but at least on linux your HDD is hardly going to cause lags if you have a well configured hardware setup.
Laptop users are many, and they care about boot up times. Especially since Linux power management is still awful.
On my current X1 Yoga 1st gen, I do regularly get almost 1.5x the uptime on battery compared to windows 10.
We got a batch of X1 Carbon 6th gen, which are "optimized for windows 10", where the S3 sleep state was replaced by the S0I3, which is OS-assisted. The X1 Yoga with S3 can both suspend and resume faster than windows 10, despite not having S0I3 (and has longer battery lifetime to booth).
And by fast I mean that by the time the lid is up, the OS is ready. By contrast, windows 10 seems to always shuffle for several seconds after resume, even on the carbon 6th gen.
So please...
One of the problems here is that power-draining can happen by different components. Quite popular are graphics chips, but other components can be part too. For example, a friend of mine has problems with his device waking up from s2idle during transport. That is not exactly what you would expect in such a discussion, but from a users perspective, he has less time to work with his device given his usage pattern.
For me, this isn't much of a problem as I prefer working on a desktop, but I wouldn't accuse someone of being a liar just because he had a bad experience with power consumption on Linux.
acpi patched_dsdt.aml
This has the advantage of not requiring any manual intervention every time your kernel is updated. The downside is that if you try to dual boot W10, it will BSOD on boot with an ACPI error. To overcome this, take the original dsdt.aml and load it in a custom (not auto-probed) menu entry for windows. You can just clone the auto-probed line, and add before the chainloader line:
acpi old_dsdt.aml
Sadly, the 6th edition of the Carbon also runs waaay hotter than the 3rd, and I did notice occasional coil whine which was previously absent. When running normally the kernel writes regularly about thermal warnings. It seems that power and heat management is not well managed in this edition, and I see similar reports for the x1 yoga 3rd gen.
My system is exceptionally lean. I run bspwm and the radios are always off except WiFi. Still, I feel like I could get a lot more from this laptop. I cannot (and I certainly wouldn't want to) install Windows on dual boot to make a comparison though.
What distribution do you use?
I personally use debian unstable with a tiling window manager (awesomewm) without a specific DE. However, I generally setup Mint for all my colleagues on the same laptop lines, and there's one colleague running Arch. We all have very similar battery lifetimes.
High-end laptop lines (Dell, HP, Lenovo) have actually pretty good linux support, they are almost always intel i5+ cpus with integrated graphics which are all very similar. There is next to zero setup required in almost any case. This is known. The drivers are tried and tested. I've never experienced any random "power management issue". Suspend/resume/battery consumption/acpi is working perfectly fine. What else does qualify for "power managment"??
I've been supporting a team of 20+ people with these lines in a mixed environment, and linux since more than a decade was always basically plug and play.
There have been some quirks in some models, which generally required some tweaks in the kernel boot line, to fix issues with backlight tweaking.
Sure, but Linux really ought to shine on the low-end laptops.
But this doesn't save you from crappy hardware, which is why this kind of argument is a non-starter for me. How well does current windows editions work on low-end crappy laptops that sell for the lowest tier? Not great. These laptops have plenty of little issues on windows as well.
Maybe better than linux, because the drivers have way more work-arounds than linux has.
Have you ever seen the internal linux quirks table to work around buggy and downright horrid hardware? That's what you get with those. If it works at all is thanks to the patience of people that put in the time to work those issues around. I frankly do not blame linux if it doesn't work well with such hardware.
Ah! So that's what's going on :D.
And you can always run strace -f on whatever handles login (getty, logind, systemd, etc), drop to a TTY and login, to see all the stuff that gets loaded.
"Enough" meaning "infinite", because you're going to have something leaking all that memory. Task manager doesn't even show memory usage by default (add the "commit size" field), only the working set (and the swapping is insanely aggressive, so memory leaks just don't show up). Nobody seems to actually check that; even built-in stuff like Windows Update leaks pretty badly.
Oh and the memory accounting doesn't even work.
I've also found macOS provides the smoothest experience. I haven't found W10 that bad, but I haven't used it that extensively. I really only boot into Windows to play games these days.
Edit: Having tried in on my laptop, installing the gjs + libgjs0g version 1.53.3 debs from http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gjs/ onto a bionic install seems to work fine. Worth trying if this bug is affecting you?
that's not what mainline kernel optimizes for, you have to use liquorix or another kernel (https://liquorix.net/)
I've recently given KDE Plasma a try and was really impressed by it's speed and smoothness.
I think it shows when your desktop does not rely on interpreted langues so much.
This isn’t how it used to be. Sigh.
Meanwhile, my SSD filled work mac bogs down in completely unpredictable ways, with weird antivirus scans that I cannot control somehow destroying javascript performance, and needing to be rebooted more than weekly to stay functional in multiple ways. I was similarly dissatisfied with OSX in the mid 2000s when I used it at school. I just don't get it
I'm playing with a Win10 machine at home, the CPU and RAM is far in excess of our work machines but it is so slow to use. It seems to regularly become unresponsive, programs take ages to start, it seems to be continually working away in the background doing 'nothing'. It's a truly horrible experience.
It's buttery smooth and I get no noticeable lag. Exactly 7 seconds from power button to login screen on a cold boot too.
Both OSX and Windows 10 do suffer from UI lag but, in my experience, it is far worse on Windows 10 to the point where I have come to absolutely detest Windows 10. It's particularly bad on the login/unlock screen, which often takes multiple seconds to even appear when you get back to your machine - frustrating when you're in a hurry.
With that said, some of it is certainly application specifically. Office 365 Outlook, for example, is particularly egregious in this regard: switching between windows, or between mail and calendar is awful. Microsoft Teams also regularly hangs for multiple seconds when switching between teams, or between chats. Extremely aggravating.