It sounds like something is horribly misconfigured.

- Try running powertop to see if it says what the issue is.

- Switch to firefox to rule out chrome misconfigurations.

- If this is wayland, try x11

I have an amd SOC desktop and it doesn’t spin up the fans or get warm unless its running a recent AAA title or an LLM. (I’m running devuan because most other distros I’ve tried aren’t stable enough these days).

In scatterplots of performance vs wattage, AMD and Apple silicon are on the same curve. Apple owns the low end and AMD owns the high end. There’s plenty of overlap in the middle.