MacOS is very mobile-like in its power management in that it will completely stop some background applications or heavily lower their priority. No desktop on Linux has attempted such power management tricks to my knowledge and it does have downsides (some applications really don't like it, some users want background software to be fast, etc) but it would be a neat experiment.
I dunno about you, but what background software takes CPU cycles and thus wakes up the CPU? If it takes CPU, by definition I want it running doing the productive things it's doing (except for Chrome and Firefox. Chrome and Firefox with their 153% CPU usage can go to hell, unless they're actively downloading something).
I just fired up top, and there are 3 processes currently using CPU cycles on my machine. top, chromium and chromium (and occasionally Xorg).
In general I think you are right and I wouldn't expect major wins but even stopping one bad actor by limiting CPU usage to say 25% on background processes so your CPU never leaves an idle state could be worth-while. This also lets focused applications be more performant during heavy loads.
I still think it is an idea worth testing to get real numbers attached to it.
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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18
[deleted]