That's not my experience at all. Macs are great on battery, but BSDs are not, they are by far the worst. Linux usually does ok, often better than windows, at least once properly set up. I only run BSD on my "never leave home/stay tethered" laptops because they only get 3-4 hours where Linux will get 8-12.

I suspect it has improved. I'm getting 8 hours out of my 5 year old T480s and I recall getting 4 hours or so when I bought it.

With which battery? Cause on my T480 with FreeBSD I can ramp it to about 14 hours.

Recently installed this one

https://www.ifixit.com/products/lenovo-thinkpad-t480s-batter...

Does the T480 have that much better battery? Maybe I'm doing something wrong haha.

That is the internal battery. Yeah, the T480 has two. An internal and a swappable. In total 96Wh.

Why could that be? Maybe the Linux distro you choose was too bloated and caused battery drain?

Because of no proper battery management, which was only recently merged.

It seems like the 6.16 and 6.17 kernels should allow for some pretty good improvements on battery and sleep mgt across more hardware from what I understand.