Funding on the other hand, does indeed equal an amount of control. The Linux foundation consistently develops and invests in things that mirror the interests of their fund sources. They fund crypto projects ffs.

Linus for example, strongly rejected GPLv3 even though it was a vastly superior version compared to GPLv2. He even rejected the concept of Tivoization, which is insane. GPLv3 would have hurt companies more and helped user freedoms.

The Linux Foundation is not where you should send your donations to - you should instead send your donations to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which actually stands for user freedoms.

The Linux kernel also includes, by default, proprietary blobs that have been added there, and these infringe upon user rights.

All of these companies that fund Linux development make lots of money from Linux, and that’s why they fund Linux. Even as desktop Linux is sometimes a competitor to Microsoft Windows, Microslop makes way more money from their enterprise software which runs on Linux, so does Amazon.

And because Linux is GPL, they cannot just take the code and spin their own version and sell it to customers without also making the code GPL, so they necessarily have to contribute to the Linux kernel if they want to also use it. They are forced to make it better, they are forced to pay up.

In cases where the project does not use a GPL license, (for example, FreeBSD, which uses the BSD license), companies just rip them off. An example is Sony, whose playstations run FreeBSD based operating systems, but Sony rarely ever contributes or funds FreeBSD development in return. This is because the BSD license allows them to take the code and make it proprietary and sell it for money themselves. With GPL, this would be illegal.

The Linux foundation barely develops the Linux kernel anymore. Most of their money goes to side projects, some AI there, some crypto here.

Besides, Linux is just the kernel. The operating system is you run is in face, the GNU operating system with the Linux kernel under the hood. GNU tools and licenses are developed and maintained by the FSF, which is not, by any means, funded by big tech.

Because these big tech companies make hardware, their support is needed in maintaining the Linux kernel (which is ultimately, a software package that contains code that can interface with hardware).

Ultimately, you are running GNU. Linux is just a marriage of convenience. If Linux development starts being guided by Big Tech against the interests of the user, then it would be trivially easy to switch over to another kernel, or even a fork of Linux.

None of the other comments here are properly answering your question, so I will pitch in.

There are two layers to this.

One layer is to use one of the many power management daemons available to you. If you’re using KDE plasma, this is power-profiles-deamon by default, and it takes care of this. Gnome has its own thing. If you want something independent, you can use TLP. You shouldn’t generally use more than one at a time. Another popular option is cpupower.

What these do is tell your CPU lower its clock speed (which means your CPU will draw less power).

If you also have a dedicated GPU (for eg. Nvidia), you should make sure that it is also powered down when not in use.

So far, you’re only communicating your preferences to the CPU and the GPU. There are however, other parts of your machine that consume power, eg, your monitor, Bluetooth and wifi modules etc. To control this layer, you need something like powertop. Powertop has an auto tune feature which enforces automatic time outs for hardware modules and make sure they go to sleep.

sudo powertop --auto-tune

But once you run this, you may find that your Bluetooth mouse may go to sleep in 5 seconds of inactivity instead of a more desirable 30, so you’ll need to go back and disable specific optimizations within power top.

There are also other obvious things you can do, such as turning down monitor brightness and disabling keyboard backlight. Monitor brightness in particular is a huge power sink.

In any case, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management is your go-to source of information. There is a lot of outdated and misinformed opinions about this on the internet, particularly about Linux computers, because battery life is something that can easily be influenced by placebo.

I’ll also say that in rare cases, certain acpi kernel parameters can also help your battery life depending on your mobo, but this takes lots of experimentation to find out.

You can read live power consumption by catting out /sys/class/power/BAT0/one_of_the_files_here when not plugged in. Once you get your idle down to under 10 watts, that’s probably good enough.

Someone would have had to do this eventually anyways. Be angry at the geriatric fascists, not developers. If it comes to it that the project cannot survive without these changes, then it would be made so that these changes are made.

Windows File Explorer is the best in terms of features, most Linux File managers lack basic functionality

This is a very, very interesting take. I have seen nobody with this opinion in my life before

Huh! Never thought about that. I too was born on January 1st 1970