Lower power portable Linux

[Ben Scott]

  A recent review[1] of the Asus Eee PC stated (paraphrased): Power
management on Linux sucks.

[1] http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/11/16/review_asus_eee_pc/print.html

  Back when I looked into this (years ago), that was largely true.
During active use, Linux was more power efficient vs Windows, but when
the machine was fully idle, Linux did little to save even more power.
Turning off the CRT was about it.  S3 (suspend-to-RAM) was often
prevented by drivers.  S4 (suspend-to-disk) was experimental,
unstable, and/or just plain didn't work.

  Can anyone who has played with this more recently comment on how a
modern Linux distro does on today's hardware?

  I'm especially interested in how it fares for someone like me, who
prefers to run a traditional *nix window manager and logon, without
session management and a desktop environment and a bunch of extra
daemons and so on.

-- Ben