"Good battery life" is not my measure of good power management. I can leave my windows laptop sitting out, it will sensibly turn off the screen and eventually hibernate, I don't need to worry about it. A Linux laptop will need babying when it's not plugged in.
Gnome has power management features like that, didn't even enable them. It's the most installed DE I think, so your characterization of Linux is pretty off.
I like Gnome and its newest incarnation Gnome 40, but at least on Nixos it has some issues so I often rebuild to an i3-based environment instead.
Of course, depends highly on the value of "they".
Because the "you may have heard..." pattern is worse than useless, here's actual info to compare and decide whether either of these may work for you:
Sadly, protectionism is a thing. Launching in new countries is hard and expensive. Perhaps there's a company in country that would do it better than some giant international megacorp.
Framework does not ship internationally yet. System 76 does.
But if I’m buying a laptop for work why would I get a laptop from a manufacturer that has no presence in my country? What am I going to do when things go wrong? Unfortunately, it may be better to take a punt on a manufacturer with global presence.
