Comment by StillBored

While each of the comments here describe individual failings, on a well supported laptop it is possible to get better power efficiency than windows if your willing to spend the time manually tuning linux, the powertop/etc suggestions are fine, but fundamentally the reason some of the 'lighter' DE's save so much power is that there is a lot of 'slop' in the default KDE/GNOME and application set. You have random things waking up to regularly and polling stuff which pulls the cores out of deep sleep states. And then there are all the kernel issues with being unable to identify and prioritize/schedule for a desktop. Ex: the only thing that should be given free reign is an active forground application, grouping and suppressing background applications, running them on little cores at slow rates if they have work to do/etc. All that is a huge part of why macos does so well vs linux on the same hardware.

The comment about ACPI being the problem is slightly off base, since its a huge part of the solution to good power management on modern hardware. There isn't another specification that allows the kind of background fine grained power tuning of random busses/devices/etc by tiny management cores who's entire purpose is monitoring activity and making adjustments required of modern machines. If one goes the DT route as QC has done here, each machine needs a huge pile of custom mailbox interface drivers upstreamed into the kernel customized for every device and hardware update/change. They get away with this in the android space because each device is literally a customized OS and they don't have the upstream turnaround problem because they don't upstream any of it, but that won't scale for general purpose compute as the parent article talks about.