> battery life, how noisy the fan is, how hot it gets under load
These are also very important factors for me as well. That's the reason I run my laptops with the cpu governor set to battery saving mode. Since for the work I do CPU is rarely the bottleneck, I get better battery life and I can never hear the fans.
I once plugged my Linux thinkpad into a projector via HDMI during a programming interview, and my laptop started smelling like it was burning. Never again!
These are also very important factors for me as well. That's the reason I run my laptops with the cpu governor set to battery saving mode. Since for the work I do CPU is rarely the bottleneck, I get better battery life and I can never hear the fans.