I have a Thinkpad X1 with a Lunar Lake CPU, running Fedora. Battery life is comparable to the Mx Macbook Pros I've owned or used. Performance is not as good on synthetic benchmarks, but more than good enough for my needs, even when running VMs or containers.

The difference is that with the standard linuxulator, the linux env. is maintained by the FreeBSD package manager, and can sometimes be out of date. Further, the standard linux compat package will install a red hat based distro, which is often not the easiest to deal with in terms of compat with random things you might want to run. I often found I had libraries that were either missing, or were a version out of date when trying to run stuff with linux compat from packages/ports. With a linux jail, you can install an ubuntu based distro & let it keep itself up to date via apt.

Bedides, the FreeBSD port of codium works fine and with a few setting changes you can install even the proprietary extensions like the Remote SSH.

There's a few tools I don't use because they don't have a FreeBSD port. I've asked the developers and they were like 'just use the compatibility layer'. But nope, then I'll just pick something else.

Right now I have nothing using the Linux compatibility layer at all which is great.

This seems like a flawed premise.

Battery:

Yes, MacBook battery life is really good, but only when you're not doing CPU-intensive tasks. Browsing the web, watching Tube or Netflix, it's amazing. Once you're compiling a bunch of stuff the battery performance tanks and seems just like any other notebook computer.

CPU: Intel Mac performance was horrible, M* is terrific. And so are the latest from AMD Ryzen.

Regardless, FreeBSD is a fantastic OS in so many ways!

Isn’t it still the case that, for speeds comparable to an Apple system, x86_64 is still more power/performance efficient than basically any other ARM-based system you can buy?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein