Besides Microsoft hardware products which represent a small share of the Windows hardware ecosystem there isn't a vertically integrated player in the Windows world but battery life on these same laptops tends to be massively better under Windows. Ubuntu and Fedora are certified for my Thinkpad and Lenovo sold it with them installed but the battery life on Windows is at least twice that under Linux. The market is just too small for Lenovo to dedicate much effort to optimizing battery life for Linux. Lenovo updates the Windows power management driver for the laptop regularly.
Windows probably has at least one person dedicated to making battery life better.
I feel like the problem with a lot of products is that there is no one dedicated specifically to the important features. If you want better battery life, you can’t haphazardly tell everyone involved to improve battery life and expect to get it — you need some that will audit everyone involved and literally shut people down.
Linux is a collection of different people’s work and so everything is sort of haphazardly sort of trying to reach a goal without ever reaching that goal, hence why Linux on the desktop is still not popular.
> Windows probably has at least one person dedicated to making battery life better
I think that person works for the hardware manufacturer, and wrote the Windows driver. I think that the likely problem here is that "Linux certified" just means that there are no showstopping bugs, "equal battery life to Windows" isn't a metric anyone is shooting for. I keep hoping that someone (maybe System 76 of Valve?) will take Linux hardware support REALLY seriously and get show what can be done.
