In this article, I aim to take a different approach. We will begin by defining a laptop according to my understanding. The I will share my personal history and journey to this point, as well as my current situation with my home and work laptops. Using this perspective, we will explore the current dysfunctionality of the standby function in modern laptops, followed by a discussion of why this feature still has relevance and right to exist. Finally, we will draw conclusions on what we can learn and take away from this.
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Unpopular opinion: the only vendor that does sleep right is Apple. The only reason they can is the tight vertical integration of the platform where they control all the hardware, all the drivers, and can exercise control over all the applications in the App Store.
More open platforms are essentially fucked.
It’s not an unpopular opinion that Apple is the only one that does sleep right. It is an unpopular opinion that this is only possible because they have a complete walled garden and that open platforms are fucked, especially considering it is easy and common to install applications from outside the App Store on macOS. We used to have sleep figured out, that’s what S3 was. But then hardware vendors dropped it. So yes, drivers and hardware vendors are part of the problem. The Steam Deck is an example of an open platform where sleep works fine.
100% this. Sleep on Linux is perfect in my older XPS (after I manually enable it). Lots of reports of it not working on newer laptops.
While I agree it doesn’t have to be a walled garden, you do have to admit that apple wouldn’t ship a laptop that couldn’t sleep properly. They are so much better at real world design than other manufacturers who were happy to abandon s3 in favour of making laptops into phones as if anyone actually wanted that.
Sleep is hit-or-miss even on System76 laptops. Dead simple on my XPS, though.
What generation do you have? I have an XPS-15 9560, it doesn’t seem to have it enabled.
Lol what is s3?
To be fair to you, I thought they were talking about AWS S3 at first and was very confused until I read the article.
Exactly
Edit! I’m wrong! Read below comment
A hibernation state where your laptop completely powers off saving current ram to disk to resume from when the system is powered back on. The article is a pretty interesting read!
Is that what the Steam Deck uses? It’s pretty useful.
I wonder. The Steam Deck holds charge very well, but then another comment here says “Nothing with with a recent AMD gfx Card or APU will officially support S3”. Perhaps the Steam Deck uses hibernate? It launches pretty fast, but then maybe storing memory to the built-in SSD is fast enough. Or perhaps even if not officially supported the S3 in the Steam Deck’s APU still works well enough. Or perhaps the APU is older than I think it is.
Where can I find beforehand which laptop supports S3? Are there any know brands that do?
Nothing with a recent AMD gfx Card or APU will officially support S3, and I think Nvidia is the same. Just because it isn’t supported doesn’t mean they’ll intentionally break anything, but over time you’ll have more and more bugs related to it and one day it will break and never be fixed.
Personally I use S4 (hibernate) more or less exclusively.
S0idle is a real problem.
Years ago you put your laptop in sleep S3 mode at 5PM, put in the backpack, resume it at 9AM the next morning and it lost maybe 10% battery.
Now S0idle is like a cellphone, always powered, so you put your laptop in a backpack, windows/Linux half support a botched S0 so some devices are still powered, either your laptop overheat or dies because battery reach 0% during the night.
S3 (hibernate) is conspicuously absent in many distros.
See my post here
