And it’s crap across the OSes. On Linux laptops don’t wake up from sleep, on Windows they keep waking up when nobody asks for it.
In our home office room there’s three laptops. My private one running Fedora, my work PC that sadly runs Windows and my wife’s laptop also running Windows.
My work laptop and my wife’s laptop keep waking up wasting electricity, and my private laptop needs a hard reset to wake it up every second time.
That feature should be stupid simple, yet it doesn’t work across the board.
Rant over.
The problem is it’s not stupid simple, it’s actually fairly complicated. Each piece of hardware and its driver must be suspended. The GPU is a particularly tricky one. Its processor must be suspended, and the state saved. In the kernel, the driver must suspend its execution, and likewise save its state. Then on resume, each half has to reload and begin execution again. And if there’s any mismatch in the resumed states, the GPU and/or driver crash and probably take the kernel with it.
Now do that for the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sound card, USB, disk controller, and every other device.
This guy sleeps.
What are you talking about? This guy dies and comes back alive every time!
No, that would be hibernation
I have had no issues with sleep on macOS, so whatever they are doing we should try to copy !
The same MacBook air, that used to last over a week with the lid closed on macOS, now needs to be charged every 3 days on Asahi NixOS.
Linux is a much better operating system, even just for the sheer variety of software available, but power management isn’t quite there yet in my experience on this laptop.
A few years ago Windows invented a new sleep state, s0ix, instead of the previous s3 state. This makes a laptop behave more like a phone, able to wake up when it receives new data.
Unfortunately this is usually implemented badly and also causing the removal or neglect of previously reliable s3 sleep.
It’s actually insane that the only company who I’ve noticed pull off s0 sleep properly is Apple with their MacBooks, which is sad. I understand they likely had already figured out how to do it properly by working on it for iOS but still, goddamn, it can’t be difficult to fix it elsewhere?
I understand Linux is a FOSS OS (and they kinda at the mercy of hardware manufacturers to upstream support for hardware) so I have no complaints there, but Microsoft that makes so much money can’t get people to fix it? I call bullshir.
MacBook seamless suspend/sleep performance is like 25% of why my personal daily driver is MacOS. Another 50% is battery life, of which their sleep/suspend management plays a part. I’ve played around with Linux on Apple hardware but it’s just never quite been there on power management or sleep/wake functionality. Which is mostly Apple’s fault for poor documentation and support for other OS’s, but it just is, and I got sick of fighting it.
I don’t think Microsoft cares
I unlocked my bios (luckily Lenovo allows that with just a “secret” key combination in the bios) and disabled modern sleep, enabled S3 and S2 and tried that, with the result that my Linux freezes every time on wake up instead of only half the time…
Don’t know what exactly they messed up there, but it’s frustrating.
What lenovo laptop do you have? I’ve had to use a special uefi tool to unlock mine
Lenovo LOQ 15ARP9.
To unlock, go to the BIOS, open advanced settings, hold FN+R+N, release, press F10 to save and reboot, head back to the BIOS and all options are unlocked.
Some Lenovo laptops have other key combinations, some need a tool, some need a modified BIOS.
wakes up when nobody asks for it.
Wrong. You might not have asked for it, but it is not your computer, it’s Windows’ computer. Microsoft decides when it wakes up.
Fair.
First thing I do on any OS, but especially linux, is turn off every sleep-related option permanently. I don’t care anymore. I won’t fight with it.
In 35 years of experience I’ve never got it to work correctly on any OS except IOS. I’ve only met ONE tech who claimed it worked for them, and that was in the 2000’s. He couldn’t demonstrate how exactly.
I do the same thing, turn that shit off because it does not work.
Do you mean iOS (iPhone) or IOS (Nintendo Wii) ? Or is there a third ?
Cisco firmware is also IOS.
The DOS BIOS was also sometimes called IOS, and the Input/Output Supervisor in the IBM OS/360 was also abbreviated as IOS.
Yeah I don’t bother with sleep either, I just turn all my stuff off when I’m done with it. With the advent of SSDs and M.2 drives, it takes about 10 seconds for my desktop to boot from fully powered off. I can wait that long lol
Trouble is you’ve then got to re-open all of your apps again. As a developer I have about 10 different things open (including zellij sessions and panes). I’ve started just leaving my computer on 24/7. How much does it cost me per month? Better not think about it!
Wait, are you suggesting it’s consistent and reliable on desktops?
I’m roughly 25 years into using computers daily and never turning them off and I’ve never had or used a desktop that didn’t sleep and wake reliably, either naturally or using the sleep and wake buttons on the keyboard, with both Linux and Windows
Are you talking the full set of S0-S3 sleep as well as hibernation? Or just whatever your machine did by default? Because I’ve never had one do all of them correctly without freezing up or having some other issue, across multiple motherboard brands and BIOS updates and so forth. ~30 years here, Windows mostly then the last few on Linux.
Yep I’m with you. I’ve been under the assumption the “sleep” button is some sort of joke Microsoft includes just to mess with people. Never had it work reliably on desktop or laptop since it appeared
Tbh, I don’t know. The last time I used a desktop on a daily basis was 2020, and that was just my work PC where I wouldn’t really care if it woke up while I wasn’t at work.
The last time I had a desktop PC at home was in 2009, so I really can’t say what is happening there in the meantime.
And at least to me, sleep on a laptop is much more important than on a desktop. Battery usage isn’t really a thing on a desktop (usually at least).
Interestingly, I do own a little 2010 netbook that I use as an ultra-mobile laptop when I really don’t need any kind of performance, and that one does all sleep states including hibernation perfectly out of the box. Even when just sleeping it loses maybe 1-2% of charge per day.
But all the other laptops I own suck when sleeping.
Well yeah obviously it’s way more important on anything portable. For me it’s very reliable on Steam Deck. But that’s also kind of a core feature, and it only has one type of sleep (in game mode at least). But it does still drain battery faster than I’d like.
I’m curious, what kind of netbook is that one you mention?
It’s an EEE PC 1005P. It’s an outdated piece of garbage, but sleeping works perfectly and the battery life is crazy. 8 hours on its extended battery, 5 hours on the stock battery. And these aren’t new batteries either.
With AntiX Linux performance is ok enough for what I need it for.
my guess is because the CPU power levels are fucking trashed because of all the patches they have to run at runtime. before Intel went all “wild west” with their security practices to improve performance, sleep worked just fine for me.
keep in mind, this was before uefi too, so it might also have a hand in the problems.
Never had I problems with sleep. Neither with arch, suse, fedora nor ubuntu. Neither with Gnome nor with kde.
Not even with windows.
Must be the hardware (brand).
My system76 wont even go to sleep anymore. It just pretends, then if i put it in a backpack for a bit it is burning hot.
System76? Shouldn’t they have support for such a case?
No idea how system76 configures their builds.
I’d check awiki if nothning else helps.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate
Possibly, tbh I spent a few hours on it and gave up, the laptop is due for a replacement anyways. It has other problems too, the touchpad connector is very flaky. Not sure I would go with them again…
Good to know, so far their on my buy list. Maybe not anymore :D My laptop is old but still works very good
The laptops are Lenovo LOQ, HP (work laptop) and Gigabyte.
It’s amazing how bad Linux and Windows are at sleeping on my laptops. My steam deck has a power drain issue too, even when fully powered off.
My steam deck has a power drain issue too, even when fully powered off.
Noticed this too… Does not feel very off
It feels like everything is running on a VM, and the hypervisor is running constantly. Or something odd like that.
This is purely anecdotally and pretty worthless as a guide or anything, but i got it working perfectly on my framework laptop running kde neon (basically Ubuntu with kde as de in rolling release mode) But its basically archeotech, past me followed a bunch of hints in the framework forum, did some unknown configuration and now it works reliable through all other updates since at least 20 month, battery holds around a week or so sleeping i think
weirdly i have the windows problem on linux with my laptop: never have I had it not wake from sleep, but sometimes it starts overheating while on sleep and drains the battery super quick
many times ive put my laptop on sleep in my pouch, taken it out and hear the fans blasting, the laptop is burning hot and the battery lost 40% in 20 minutes
Are you talking about sleep, hibernate, or monitor off?
Sleep and hibernate don’t work for me.
Hibernate just acts like a power loss. After shutting down the state is just lost and the laptop starts up with a fresh boot.
With Modern Sleep, kernels 6.11+ go to sleep fine, but don’t manage to wake back up. The keyboard lights up for half a minute, the fan goes on, the screen stays dark and after half a minute the laptop goes back to sleep. Kernel 6.10 sometimes works, sometimes behaves like 6.11+. I’d say it works 80% of the time.
I disabled Modern Sleep in BIOS and tried to enable S3, S2 and S2+S3 in BIOS instead. I set the corresponding sleep states in Linux as well, and no matter which one of the non-modern-sleep options I try, and no matter if I’m using kernel 6.10 or 6.15, it never manages to wake up (same symptoms as above).
Yes
Re the windows waking up, it’s likely a network card/chip to blame. You can disable the ability to wake inside Device Manager. Every time I had a system wake unexpectedly, networking was to blame.
I also had it that one laptop was configured to wake any time the mouse moved even a tiny bit. So walk past the laptop, laptop is now awake.
Sadly I cannot configure any of that on my work laptop, because helpdesk thinks allowing me to do so would be a security risk or something like that.
My laptop refuses to stay asleep if fstab disks were disconnected prior to sleeping. It works perfectly fine for me now that I figured that out.
Just one more weird behavior with fstab and kde or Linux or arch? I don’t know who to blame.
