Alienware? I suspect you have a dedicated graphics card?
Or any other "performance"-component for that matter, which typically requires proprietary software counterpart (drivers) to run efficiently. Most vendors only ship decent Windows drivers, and the Linux counterpart (if any) is considered "good enough".
I would not consider this the fault of kernel developers. Often there is basically nothing they can do. You just need to look at what hoops the Nouveau-devs have to jump through - colossal effort, little appreciation from users.
Probably an Optimus setup on the Windows side. It basically powers down the graphics card most of the time and switches to the lighter Intel graphics instead. Linux support for Optimus is poor and usually you end up having to choose either good battery life or good gaming performance.
I don't know about AMD but nvidia cards have a management interface that provides useful data like temperatures, load and wattage. AMD should have something similar.
I wrote a script to query that data and output it in a format compatible with i3status. In case you'd like to see how it works:
I'm pretty sure Intel `powertop` can tell you, but if it can't tell you directly you can measure the difference in power consumption depending on whether the dGPU is enabled in the BIOS.
Or any other "performance"-component for that matter, which typically requires proprietary software counterpart (drivers) to run efficiently. Most vendors only ship decent Windows drivers, and the Linux counterpart (if any) is considered "good enough".
I would not consider this the fault of kernel developers. Often there is basically nothing they can do. You just need to look at what hoops the Nouveau-devs have to jump through - colossal effort, little appreciation from users.