alt Hacker NewsIf you look at ARM, SBC and MiniPC market, Linux can be very frugal when it comes to power management and RAM use. Just because a bog standard Ubuntu or Debian is not tuned towards it doesn't mean it can't.
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It’s not only a matter of tuning. Everything in the stack needs to be developed to go idle and not do things in the background by themselves. The Linux desktop and all its apps are made for a model where apps can continually get CPU time.
The hard part isn't having a few people design something powersaving, it's having the whole set of distro software working together for power savings.
That's the incredibly hard part - not having some random package run a cron job every 10 seconds because it was easier for the developer to do it.
And Linux developers get incredibly angry - keeping grudges for decades - if you try to add systems that enforce power saving behavior necessary for devices to last a whole day.
This is where the difference between Android/iOS and Linux distros lies in practice. And people are still - even on HN - incredibly angry at Android for not letting them destroy the battery anymore.
It's a problem at the Wayland/Wayland protocols/XDG level.
There is simply not enough rich app activity information for the session manager to do smart management.
Compare it to what iOS and Android apps report about themseleves and the conditions they are forced to run in (such as being arbitrarily killed and restarted).
Obviously the Linux kernel is perfectly able to sit in a stack like this (see: Android), it's the XDG standards which are not well suited for this.