Comment by roryirvine

Yeah, my 3-ish year old 13.4" XPS Plus is currently consuming 3.9 W with around 150 open tabs across four Firefox windows, 3 active Electron apps, Libreoffice Writer & Impress, a text editor, and a couple of terminals.

That's in an extremely vanilla Debian stable install, running in the default "Balanced" power mode, without any power-related tuning or configuration.

That compares reasonably well with my 14" M3 Macbook Pro, which seems to be drawing around 3.5 W with a similar set of apps open.

Sure, the XPS is flattered in this comparison because it has a slightly smaller screen, but even accounting for that it would still be... fine? Easily enough to get through a full day of use, which is all I care about.

There's nothing special about this XPS, and I'd expect the Thinkpad models that have explicit Linux support to be equally fine. The key point is that the vendor has put some amount of care and attention into producing a supportable system.