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For me, Arch won on every machine, desktop, laptop and RPi and I think it mostly had to do with how Arch stays the closest to unix philosophy. I used Fedora for a few years and before that Ubuntu and I think I only ever rolled my own package or modified an existing one once or twice because of the sheer complexity of it. With Arch, from day one I was fiddling around and every time I need something that's not packaged already (and that's rare), it takes me minutes to do it myself. I'd much rather know how to build my way through (and not suffer) than cross my fingers that someone else already has.

Adding to that, I find Arch to be so clean and minimalist and more importantly unsurprising. Because of its rolling release cycle, I never have to plan an upgrade which always stressed me out with Fedora and Ubuntu.

Regarding hardware support, I'm running Arch on a mid 2015 manufactured Lenovo X250 and everything works out of the box and I get a solid 8 hours battery life out of it.

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Well I'm one Arch + Gentoo user. Though I've optimized both to be as energy efficient as possible, I've never been able to get something comparable to Windows in terms of battery life. So once it's fully optimized (and I'm on XMonad, not GNOME, so power consumption should be fairly less), I can draw about 3 hours or so, as long as my browser (Chrome) isn't running Javascript. The moment I start some decent browsing, I cannot get more than say 2 hours from my laptop. Video watching? Again, not more than 2 hours. On Windows I could go on to watch movies for more than 4 hours (this might be less because of the smaller battery on my device). Do you do some special magic to get that much juice out of your battery? I'd love to know some cool tips. I myself wrote some on my blog.

P.S. Not to mention, running Emerge on Gentoo with -j9 lands me at a battery life of less than half an hour :P

As boring as it may sound, I didn't do anything special, just the run of the mill practices: lowering brightness, running `powertop` and setting all tunables to "Good". At idle, this gives me ~3 Watts usage. With the 46 Wh battery, that's 15 hours. Of course when I start using the laptop that's halved more or less. With the screen off (when I'm using the external screen), it goes down to ~2 Watts, for a whopping 23 hours battery life at idle. I remember an Acer Travelmate I purchased back in 2009. The lowest I could get the power consumption was 7 Watts at idle. I'd say Intel for the most part, has come a long way in power efficiency.

EDIT: I use Mate Desktop BTW.