I've used various distros on my recentish Dell laptop. I get the advertised 8-10hrs without configuring anything.

It just werks.

I configured my Thinkpad X280 under Arch to run at roughly 3 Joules/second. Which gives me way over 12 hours of active use time.

Linux is far superior to windows in this regard.

Unless, unfortunately, you've got switchable nVidia graphics. As of last year, at least, without some real gross stuff you're looking either at awful multi-monitor performance on AC power (because the dGPU is permanently switched off) or awful battery life (because you're using the nVidia chipset and it eats batteries for breakfast, lunch, and dinner).

Nvidia's Linux support story has been crummy for the last half decade, if you bought a laptop with an Nvidia dGPU and are expecting it to work efficiently in Linux then you need an expectation reset.

Yeah, for graphics it sucks. OTOH, for CUDA it's literally just plug-and-play (at least on Ubuntu 20.04).

Makes a nice change from five years ago, when I kept breaking my display in order to make CUDA work.

> Joules/second

aka Watts

To be fair the laptop is rated for 16.5 hrs.

Yes, in some weird lab setting with 12% screen brightness and no user activity.

a friend got X250 with no tuning to work continuously for something like 26 hours.

But thinkpads didn't tend to remove batteries to get slimmer then.

how's the keyboard compared to 2015 macbooks?

It's very much OK. It's different but it's still good. I prefer the MBP (provided 2015 is still the old non-butterfly mechanism) but I would have no problem with switching 100% to the TP keyboard.

Why isn't Linux configured to better preserve battery life on laptops by default? Power usage has been an issue for over a decade. If it's just a matter of a few tweaks, surely it could be done?

It's not a matter of just a few tweaks. It's a few new tweaks each generation, as Microsoft and Intel keep changing their minds on what the "right" way is to put devices into low-power modes, and then not thoroughly documenting those changes let alone upstream them for inclusion in standards documents.

And then there are the hardware bugs which require workarounds in firmware or drivers, and the firmware bugs which require workarounds in drivers, all of which are only developed and tested against Windows.

The set of power management options that Windows 10 exposes to the user has been steadily dwindling to the point that on a new laptop you basically only get to customize how long before the screen shuts off and how long before it goes to sleep. All the more detailed options you had in early Windows 10 or in Windows 7 are no longer exposed, because there's no consistent way to map such controls onto the ever-shifting set of underlying platform features.

Distros don't even automatically install and configure TLP when they detect an internal battery. So yeah, it is 'Linux' that is the problem on laptops.

That and automatically activating a 'small speaker' EQ for when a device is detected to be portable / be a laptop and have internal speakers would be a massive user experience improvement for laptop Linux users.

> Distros don't even automatically install and configure TLP when they detect an internal battery.

TLP isn't magic. More than half of its documented options are inapplicable to current hardware or kernels, and a fair number of the remaining options that could still have an effect are not safe for distros to ship as defaults, usually because they'll trigger firmware or hardware bugs. Installing TLP by default would be far from an actual solution, and isn't even that great a first step toward solving platform power management inadequacies.

A few tweaks for each different model of laptop. Consumes a lot of volunteer effort very quickly, that.

And some of the tweaks can cause instability or data loss on different models with different quirks.

Mostly speculation, but I think a big part of it is that MacOS will heavily throttle as it needs to, and I imagine that Windows laptop drivers get a lot of love in that space too since the manufacturers want to get good battery life in their machines as well.

I'm sure a huge component of it is just people-hours spent in figuring out the right balance of defaults that don't just mess people's setups up.

It's up to each distribution to provide a kernel build + configuration that suits some specific use-case.

Pop OS has it's own power management that is pretty decent. I can almost get through a whole day of work without plugging in.