As far as I can tell, and I am not an expert, it has always boiled down to hardware/driver parity. Laptops ship with proprietary hardware and drivers that Windo

As far as I can tell, and I am not an expert, it has always boiled down to hardware/driver parity. Laptops ship with proprietary hardware and drivers that Windows can tap into to optimize battery life, things like turning off hard drives and stuff, but that a Linux doesn't have access to. Provided hardware/driver parity, a Linux environment should generally be more lightweight and last longer. Maybe that was your experience with the XPS; those guys also ship with Linux out of the box like you said, so the hardware should lend itself just as well to Linux distributions.