My M2 MBA routinely goes past 10-16 hours of life time with simple coding stuff (phpstorm and PHP in Docker), and it stays comfortably cold all time. Most Windows laptops struggle to get more than 3-4 hours and will fry off your balls if used as actual laptops.

The poster was apparently a 100% Linux person previously, though. I’m pretty sure Windows was designed to heat up like that as a funny joke. For example on Reddit I see somebody complain that they only get 5 hours with my laptop model (zenbook flip 13)

https://www.reddit.com/r/ASUS/comments/ry0nwb/the_asus_flip_...

But it is pretty easy to get 14 in Linux I think, at least if you believe the battery indicator.

> I’m pretty sure Windows was designed to heat up like that as a funny joke

Nah, it's common across all x86 devices. Even Apple's old lineup... which is why they went for M in the first place, Intel couldn't be arsed to deliver something power efficient.

I guess I find this troubling because it would seem to indicate that I spend multiple hours a day typing at a dead laptop, hallucinating that it is still working.

To be fair, Windows has better battery optimisations for new laptops. Many hardware supported sleep modes are still missing from Linux kernel, for example, when I checked last time.

Huge differences come probably from the lack of user skills, less about the OS. Or just broken drivers.

Isn't battery life generally much worse on Linux compared to Windows?

It is pretty configurable. I don’t see why it should be worse (assuming of course you don’t have driver problems).

And the configuration is pretty helpful, for example I have an OLED screen, so I can get some power savings from making things mostly black.

Plus the hard drive can mostly be idle; you don’t have Cortana or whatever they call it now poking around for interesting bits.

Most recent Thinkpad was X1 Carbon with Kubuntu, running intellij / browsers / docker would last around 3 hours or so. M1 Air is 15+.

I also have a Anker 737 battery, with it I can double the macbook's battery if fully charged. The Thinkpad would only charge partially, so wouldn't even double.

That’s weird, I wonder which program did it.

I typically get a day of work out of my Zenbook flip 13; I haven’t really measured the battery performance rigorously because it is easily long enough that I don’t think about it (the battery indicator will say 14 hours, but those are of course pretty flaky). I’m a vim/Firefox with ads blocked guy though so I guess I must not be making it work very hard.