[Niten]

It depends on your setup. I've had best results doing my development on a powerful workstation that, when coupled with a good LTS operating system like CentOS 7, doesn't give me any maintenance headaches (or at least amortises any headaches over a sufficiently long time that I don't care), and doesn't force me to deal with the battery issues you mentioned or the other fiddly bits of running Linux on a laptop.

This was pretty easy to setup and has run quite well without much administrative work beyond the initial installation (something I've never been able to say for Ubuntu, unfortunately), and when I'm away I can just SSH in from a Chromebook.