IsoKiero , 9 hours ago

Interesting thought indeed, but I highly doubt that difference is anything you could measure and there’s a ton of contributing factors, like what kind of services are running on a given host. So, in order to get a reasonable comparison you should run multiple different software with pretty much identical usage patterns on both operating systems to get any kind of comparable results.

Also, the hardware support plays a big part. A laptop with dual GPUs and a “perfect” support from drivers on Windows would absolutely wipe the floor with Linux which couldn’t switch GPUs at the fly (I don’t know how well that scenario is supported on linux today). Same with multicore-cpu’s and their efficient usage, but I think on that the operating system plays a lot smaller role.

However changes in hardware, like ARM CPUs, would make a huge difference globally, and at least traditionally that’s the part where linux shines on compatibility and why Macs run on batteries for longer. But in the reality, if we could squeeze more of our CPU cycles globally to do stuff more efficiently we’d just throw more stuff on them and still consume more power.

Back when cellphones (and other rechargeable things) became mainstream their chargers were so unefficient that unplugging them actually made sense, but today our USB-bricks consume next to nothing when they’re idle so it doesn’t really matter.