It's the combination of the two that yields the best of both worlds.

Android SoCs have adopted heterogenous CPU architectures ("big.LITTLE" in the ARM sphere) years before Apple, and as a result, there have been multiple attempts to tackle this in Linux. The latest, upstream, and perhaps the most widely deployed way of efficiently using such processors involves using Energy-Aware Scheduling [1]. This allows the kernel to differentiate between performant and efficient cores, and schedule work accordingly, avoiding situations in which brief workloads are put on P cores and the demanding ones start hogging E cores. Thanks to this, P cores can also be put to sleep when their extra power is not needed, saving power.

One advantage macOS still has over Linux is that its kernel can tell performance-critical and background workloads apart without taking guesses. This is beneficial on all sorts of systems, but particularly shines on those heterogenous ones, allowing unimportant workloads to always occupy E cores, and freeing P cores for loads that would benefit from them, or simply letting them sleep for longer. Apple solved this problem by defining a standard interface for the user-space to communicate such information down [2]. As far as I'm aware, Linux currently lacks an equivalent [3].

Technically, your application can still pin its threads to individual cores, but to know which core is which, it would have to parse information internal to the scheduler. I haven't seen any Linux application that does this.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/scheduler/sched-energ...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Pe...

[3] https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-corelibs-libdispatch?tab=...