> Mind that I come from a Ubuntu distro, Windows is the most energy efficient solution at the moment and allows me to run my Dev tools and work on battery for 4 hours straight. Ubuntu (or any Debian-based distro) destroy my battery in 40 minutes and there's no solution or optimization for that.
I know this is not a solution, but the Librem laptops from Purism hold up for hours straight. I also used to run Windows on laptops for the same reason, but the obvious solution to this is to buy a laptop built with Linux in mind from the ground up, and now we have options available.
I quadrupled battery life when I switched form Windows to Ubuntu. No idea why. I'm using a Dell XPS 15 which has factory support for Linux. I didn't do a lot of digging into why... was just happy to be able to go 4 hours instead of one.
As far as I can tell, and I am not an expert, it has always boiled down to hardware/driver parity. Laptops ship with proprietary hardware and drivers that Windows can tap into to optimize battery life, things like turning off hard drives and stuff, but that a Linux doesn't have access to. Provided hardware/driver parity, a Linux environment should generally be more lightweight and last longer. Maybe that was your experience with the XPS; those guys also ship with Linux out of the box like you said, so the hardware should lend itself just as well to Linux distributions.
If you were only getting a single hour on a laptop, I’m almost certain your battery management settings weren’t configured correctly (brightness on max, etc)
I know this is not a solution, but the Librem laptops from Purism hold up for hours straight. I also used to run Windows on laptops for the same reason, but the obvious solution to this is to buy a laptop built with Linux in mind from the ground up, and now we have options available.