I have a Dell XPS which dual boots Ubuntu and for some time I noticed the x86 core package temp would regularly go to 100C when running in the Linux partition, and it didn't seem like there were the same kind of thermal issues in the Windows partition, so I suspect whatever thermal drivers were in Ubuntu by default didn't work very well with my laptop's particular hardware. I discovered that with the program cpupower you can set a hard upper limit for clock rate on your cores, and now my processor stays under around 80C. So if you have a laptop that seems thermally unstable when running Linux, I'd highly recommend capping your clock rate with cpupower. Thermal stability definitely adds to the feeling of polish. Maybe some people have chronically thermally unstable laptops like I did and could benefit from seeing this.
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