I use Linux for that. I have a pretty and modern UI, all of the unix commodities I want... all on a brand new and powerful laptop that has plenty of battery life. (My last laptop... a Samsung Series 9... would last 14+ hours on a charge. My current laptop is a bit more power hungry... but it has a fairly beefy i7 and such. It still gets me through the day though)
It's just a matter of momentum... and Apple certainly has that in spades.
I did switch to using MacOS for several years... but am now back on Linux. It's just a better for development for me. But hey... Linux has been my primary workhorse since the 90s... so I am certainly biased. I did give the MacOS bandwagon a try though. :D
Wow, that is impressive battery life.
I am curious, what Linux distributions you used? (especially for those back in the 90s :D) I was stuck on Gentoo than Arch for the most of the time.
I used to get 8-9hrs on macOS and about 6-8hrs on Ubuntu on the same Macbook. I'm sure Linux can do much better on non-apple hardware that is more or less open or well known in the Linux community. The problem with Linux and power savings is that a lot of the proprietary hardware manufacturers don't release specs that make writing drivers easy for obvious reasons so Linux open source driver implementation is never as good as macOS or Windows. Dell's XPS13 developer edition has been doing quite well in the last couple of years. If it picks up more steam, we could see Dell or Intel write proper open source (or closed) drivers to support the hardware better.
I'd get about 9-10 hours on a Macbook Pro simply lazily web browsing. This is theoretically reported battery life, however.
I never actually let it run down to 0. It's possible the last 10% would have vanished in 30 minutes instead of ~2 hours like it claimed.
I can certainly believe a Linux machine can get 14hrs. It's just a matter of having a bigger battery, and a processor that will step-down its speed when its not needed.
It's just a matter of momentum... and Apple certainly has that in spades.
I did switch to using MacOS for several years... but am now back on Linux. It's just a better for development for me. But hey... Linux has been my primary workhorse since the 90s... so I am certainly biased. I did give the MacOS bandwagon a try though. :D