Correct, and the drivers that get worked on are the ones that we kernel developers have access to. The situation has gotten better as more and more vendors have contributed drivers over the years and standards have allowed many devices to run on a single driver and we've become more focused on improving and adopting USB, PCI, etc. Plus kernel builds have become more automated as companies like Intel contribute lots of automated builds against tons of different hardware configurations. Still though, Linux is focused on the server and mobile market. That's what people like me get paid to work on, and so it's going to get the best support.
> Since you work on the kernel, maybe you can answer this - does Linux have something similar to timer coalescing?
Yes it does. Also Google has contributed tons, and tons, and tons of power management code (for Android of course). Power management on Linux has improved tremendously. There's still only so much that can be done, because we don't have as tight of an integration into the hardware stack on Desktop. We can't force vendors to implement certain features or make sure everyone implements certain low power state callbacks in drivers.
I think Linux’s hardware agnosticism is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, you can run it anywhere, but it doesn’t run great anywhere.
I think that could change though. IMHO, Asahi Linux is one of the most interesting things going on in the world of Linux right now. They don’t have to support a lot of different hardware configurations so I think they have a good chance of really getting things dialed in and creating a super polished product.
Since you work on the kernel, maybe you can answer this - does Linux have something similar to timer coalescing? IIRC, that’s one of thing in macOS that helps them with battery life.