Is there a laptop with super-awesome battery life on Linux? I'll buy one if so.
I'm not sure it's fair to ding Framework specifically for not being able to make Linux battery life as good as Windows. Is that actually something they could reasonably fix?
It’s not about dinging Framework specifically and more about if you want *nix and top tier battery life, MacBooks remain the best option.
My understanding is that the reason why Linux still struggles in this front is that nobody has put in the hardware-specific optimization work to make it happen. There’s also some friction with how the bulk of Linux dev attention is paid to servers rather than portable consumer hardware.
Along those lines, IMO these "spec wars" are not that important. I get that some people want the best bang for their buck, but pretty much everything has more than enough speed and battery life for most practical uses in my opinion.
I am probably not competent to improve linux battery life myself (or at least I certainly don't have the time to get into that). But I can choose to spend my money on hardware and companies that explicitly support Linux, even if they aren't at the very top of the spec sheet. This has the best practical chance of convincing big-money companies and Linux kernel experts to actually spend time and money on this. Meanwhile, buying a Macbook and installing Linux on it is fine, I guess, but also invisible to the corporate world.
On this note, the world where buying a Framework or really any other Windows PC meant getting roughly 1/2 the battery life of a MacBook really doesn't exist anymore like it did in 2020, so long as you do your research and buy the right system.
I think there's a lot of assumption among the group of people who have stuck with MacBooks since the M1 days that shopping the competition means compromising with a huge performance/battery life/value gap, but that reality that existed in 2020 is much different than the current situation in 2026.
If you are in the market for a MacBook Air for the kinds of things that most people use MacBook Airs for, the average user won't notice that the battery life or performance on a computer equipped with a Panther Lake or Qualcomm chip is different from a MacBook Air at all.