Now you get the benefit of Windows power management (and that beautiful laptop battery life) but a web browser Microsoft isn't going to mess with.
This sounds hilarious were it not the way I actually work.
PS: I'll also mention that VSCode from Windows to WSL2 + Debian is a mind-blowingly wonderful thing, I don't know how it works but it's near magical as a dev environment when you need a full Linux but like having battery life.
Linux has never been this, and likely never will be. On any hardware supported fully by both, Windows will always have better battery life. Back when I was a thinkpad user, i'd literally live in a vmware workstation linux VM on windows, and THIS had better battery life than linux natively on the same thinkpad.
Oh, HP recommends Windows 11 (tm) (r) (c). Both worked 100% from day 1 on Linux. But both laptops had issues during the first year under windows (no webcam on the amd, boken external screen output on the intel), so maybe they don't qualify as "supported by both".
Chromebook and Android works very well. They use Linux kernel.
From the Thinkpads I have seen and used (last one in 2023) I haven't yet seen one that is "fully supported" out of the box on Linux and all of them required some degree of tinkering.
By the way Arch wiki has a nice overview on configuring power saving properly, in case you ever need it in the future: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management
It feels like over the past 10y Linux only went from 2h to 3h of battery life. While MacBook went from 3h to 13h.
This hardware does not exist, or at least it's exceedingly rare. something most folks miss is that the OS supports the hardware (though for Windows it's more the drivers than the OS, but I digress), but equally (and perhaps moreso) the hardware supports the OS.
Modern hardware is full of code (almost always proprietary), in ACPI, in EFI, in the EC, in all the devices. You cannot (without significant engineering effort) make the hardware support both OSes equally.
Is that sarcasm? I never had good battery life on a laptop running Windows. Linux has always been superior to me in that regard (maybe if nvidia optimus is at play?).
In this case Windows is the only sane choice (at least based on my experience from 2 years ago).
After a lot of reading random docs, I got to a point where I could stop the GPU from eating the battery doing nothing, but I could only disable/enable it by logging out then in. It was either no GPU at all or a GPU drawing maximum power, no in-between.
Maybe Nvidia's latest code releases will help with that?
What kind of system are you running?
On my thinkpad, arch install squeezes 9 hours after 7 years of use.
On a dell XPS I'd get about 13 hours with the gpu disabled and display set to 1440p instead of 4k. Sure you might say "but I need my GPU and 4k 15'' display" to which I reply eh maybe but I don't.
Mine's a 4th gen X1 carbon with an ancient Antergos install from 2016 that I converted to normal arch after they closed the project. i3wm, probably some thinkpad specific tweaks from the arch wiki but the machine is so damn stable I rarely think about it.
I have a normal ubuntu install, I use the i3wm to reduce general load. Resolution set to 1440p with xrandr, no scale adjustments. GPU disabled, totally on intel graphics.
My xps is about 4.5 years old right now, I have replaced the battery when it started to swell slightly, the replacement was salvaged from another and even worse, so after a year I put the original battery back in.
I honestly think the biggest thing is a tiling wm. Any time I go from full gnome to i3wm, my battery life gets an instant 3 hour bonus.
Big ole note, because of the age and battery degradation, i can squeeze about 6-7 hours out of with if I limit myself to a single firefox window and text editors. When it was brand new, 13 hours of normal use was totally doable.
I got fed up with trying to run Fusion360 on Linux, no longer had a Mac, and reignited my long disused Windows installation recently. Updated and restarted. Looked around for WSL, nothing. Searched online, loads of blog spam of mixed helpfulness, no way of telling (for me, new to it) if they were v1 or v2, no basic information like they're talking about Ubuntu but is that a requirement? What changes if I want x? Looked in the app store, ..stuff yes, including 'Arch WSL' for example, but is this right? It seems to work, but really, I'm supposed to install something third-party?
I assumed it was just something that was there built-in by default, but apparently not? Probably is if I first go start run regedit and set Computer Computer Windows HKLM Software Windows Windows Linux Software WSL enable to '2', right? Easy.
Don't touch the registry.
I really can't fathom how any technically-minded professional gets anything done with Windows - nevermind SEs - it just feels constantly in the way. And I'm not a die-hard Linux (nor Apple) fanatic, I grew up with Windows, it got me into 'computers'. It just seems like an uncontrollable (as in literally, operator not in control) mess compared even to macOS to me now.
(I also really wanted to like it coming back to it - I thought with WSL surely that was going to take the Unixy strength of macOS and far supersede it as a when-I-can't-use-Linux device. But so far, egh, nevermind that I think the hardware's great, I think I'd pay the Apple tax just for the OS.)
Maybe I'll try again to upgrade if the integrated graphics support it.
Of course, that limits system integration, but you can still register it as a default browser.
I prefer as few outside opinions on what I run as possible, so I only leave Chrome and VSCode in Windows and everything else is in Linux.
I had run Linux for years, but whilst I still have Linux on desktop machines I leave Windows on my laptop as it truly gives me 8-9h battery life and Linux only gives me a matter of a few hours tops.
