In 8 hours it uses 20% of the battery. When Windows or Mac are put to sleep, the damn things can sleep for a week! This is the case with Linux on multiple laptops.
Is there some kind of manipulation going by ring -1 that detects Linux is running? Is Linux not respecting some procedure and kissing a step?
No idea if this applies to a lot of laptops, but on my HP with an i5-8350U every Linux distro I’ve tried seems to come configured using s2idle instead of deep sleep, and battery will drain very quickly even in ‘sleep’ mode.
If running
cat /sys/power/mem_sleepreturns “[s2idle] deep” then you can addmem_sleep_default=deepto your kernel args and it will actually go to sleep properly.On Fedora this was
sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="mem_sleep_default=deep"but it varies by distro.Why it seems like every distro I’ve used has this set incorrectly I do not know, it’s baffling.
Interesting. “s2Idle” sounds like it’s idling and wasting cycles when it’s supposed to be sleeping. I’ll try those commands.
Also perplexing to me that idle is chosen as a default.
Too much screentime before bed?
SWAP avenger here. And they said SWAP partitions were old hat… Pah!
I have an Acer Swift 3:2 running Manjaro with a swap partition encrypted with LUKS2. I recently got a new laptop so poor old Swifty been languishing in a messenger bag.
The important distinction here being that my lid is tied to hibernate, not sleep, because fuck sleep mode… why do I want my laptop in “low power mode”? So I can charge it as soon as I open it? No thanks!
Three months pass. Crap can’t seem to connect to my VNC over SSH, hmm, what to do… I wonder if my Acer can connect?
Pull old Swifty out of the bag, open it up, enter decryption key, it’s on in moments, 95% battery.
Skill issue? (I’m joking, or am I?) 🐸
Hibernate is suspend to disk, power off. There is almost zero power consumption. You’ll lose more just to thermodynamics.
Exactly, that’s why I choose it on all of my mobile systems. It also survives power outages which is important in storm-prone geographies.
Debian has worked fine on my old laptop, probably only a few days for me but the battery is a decade old or so.
I’ve only used windows at work in the past 10 years or so but my windows experience with sleep was far far worse.
My laptop would always wake up in my bag on my hour+ commute. The laptop would be scorching hot and the battery dead by the time I got to the office. Every time.
Never experienced that in Linux.
Recently I switched to a Linux computer at work and it’s much better in every regard.
My personal desktop (runs arch (btw)), did have some trouble with sleep recently tho…I replaced my 5700G with a 5600X3D and it would refuse to wake from sleep, necessitating a hard shutdown (by PSU switch!)…but I think that was a bios bug. My bios was already very close to latest but I think upgrading that was what ultimately fixed it. Now it works fine.
When Windows or Mac are put to sleep, the damn things can sleep for a week!
When I put my Windows work laptop to sleep, it damn well can sleep for a week. In fact, it sleeps so well that you could fell a tree next to it and it still wouldn’t wake up.
They should really rename that button to “coma”. “Sleep” implies you can wake it up.
Wait, how do you get it out of sleep then? Hard shut down by holding the power button down for a few seconds?
Windows doesn’t sleep. Ever. Sleep is now just a nickname for Modern Standby, which is just running in low power mode doing a whole bunch of shit. The amount of times I come back to my laptop and it has gotten stuck at a reboot is just embarrassing. I dual-boot and have Grub, so whenever Windows tries to reboot itself it gets stuck.
People have gotten their laptops damaged because they thought they were sleeping and put them in a bag, when Windows decides to try to update itself while the fans are blocked inside the bad. Bam, heat damage.
Shouldn’t modern laptops have temperature sensors and just deal with it in some way? I had this happen to me a few times with my old Thinkpad from 12 years ago. Threw it into the backpack in a rush and an hour later I’d pull it out, hot and doing something I didn’t want it to do… But it never suffered any kind of damage from that. Was just very annoying.
Also, the failure gets registered forever, for example, in RAID disks you’ll never get a 100% healthy disk with such situation.
You can’t interrupt Windows Update either. So, rock meets hard place?
Sure 😆 In the meantime I found a solution for all the Windows Update debacle. Bought a newer laptop, went home and just wiped the entire SSD before installing Linux. Now I don’t get any dual-boot or Windows update. Also goes to standby 100% of the time. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I would expect overheating protection to occur at the hardware level: first downclock the CPU and forcibly just halt if heat gets critical for too long.
Sure but the update can already have done some stuff, leaving your machine in a half-updated and maybe corrupted state. If downclocking doesn’t work there really isn’t a good solution here.
Edit: oh wait there is, DON’T UPDATE WHEN SLEEPING. And on top of that, just don’t update without my explicit approval at all. Thankfully I run linux where, if it’s not the default already, it’s a config value away.
I recommend using hibernate (suspend to disk): your computer will “sleep” for 10 years without draining. The only cost is about 7 seconds to boot on modern hardware. For short interruptions with instant wakeup, you can still use light sleep states.
It combines perfectly with LUKS-encrypted root and swap partitions: your data is safe even if someone steals your computer and swakes it up.
Hibernate with an encrypted swap and systemd boot takes forever for me. How do you manage in 7 seconds? How much RAM do you have?
I’ve found full shutdown and subsequent boot up on my current Bazzite setup takes less time then hibernate used to in Windows 10 on the same PC. Haven’t even felt the need to look into setting up swap (Bazzite uses zram by default).
full shutdown and subsequent boot up on my current Bazzite setup takes less time than hibernate
maybe, but a full shutdown and reboot does not restore all your apps, open documents, terminals etc exactly as they were.
And Bazzite is considered “slow” in terms of Linux distro boot times
Unfortunately, hibernate does not work on all devices. I believe, it depends on the motherboard and BIOS…
Your system goes to sleep and wakes up? My system goes to sleep and then crashes. We are not the same
Your system and me have a lot in common (⌐■_■)
This, Bluetooth, WiFi, screen scaling. 2026 and Linux nuts still tell people it’ll just work 🤣
For common hardware, yeah it does. With my new lenovo work laptop it was just that - worked fine out of the box. Even dock and multiple displays…
Exotic hardware always needs tinkering, Windows is no different there in my experience.
Only issue I’ve had with Bluetooth in Linux is that Microsoft made me upgrade the firmware in my Xbox controllers to use it…
It’s mostly a mix of newer laptops not supporting suspend to RAM (only suspend to idle), and faulty hardware requiring proprietary hacks to actually go idle.
I once did a deep dive on sleep mode for some problem a friend was having. I’m now convinced it might be the worst thing I’ve ever seen in modern computing. It’s globally horrendous, poorly implemented, and causes random problems in unfathomable places. It’s amazing it ever works at all.
It makes what Valve was able to do with the Steam Deck even more impressive imo. You can suspend mid game, like a Nintendo Switch, and it just works.
That’s just cause its an AMD APU, and nvidia hates linux.
Which is nice and impressive, but its cause nvidia’s shit, not anything valve specific
I just want the option to put my Linux laptop into S3 ACPI power State. Daim you modern W11 hardware and S0!!!
Power state? Is that what’s going on?
Always wondered this. My steam deck dies in a day if put to sleep or hibernate.
if the battery dies during hibernate, it’s not hibernating
incidentally I have been using linux for years and have never had a working hibernation setup. I’m convinced it’s a hoax at this point
Works great with HP Elitebooks G3–G4; honestly, worked great on any HP I’ve used. Might’ve worked on the Dells I’d used but they had other problems and didn’t last very long so I don’t remember.
But I’ve largely used older laptops so I’m not sure if the hardware, specifically, may have anything to do with it.
I’ve been using it pretty consistently for years, I achieve uptimes upwards of 60 days like this. The downside is that it takes kinda long to enter that state and there’s a chance that it fails to enter it (though it doesn’t crash, just goes to the screenlock), especially on my laptop - it refuses to go into hibernation unless I kill most webbrowser windows, especially stuff like YouTube.
And you do need a pretty large swap space; with those super long uptimes, even swap size = ram size isn’t always enough, because sometimes the swap space is actually used as swap and not just as hibernation image storage.
Twice your RAM is the old adage.
Using swap for hibernate was always insane to me…
Really, hibernate as well? On my linux desktop and laptops, hibernate completely cuts the power. It’s definitely possible that this works differently for a handheld device, though, and I don’t think I even tried using hibernate on an ARM device.
I kept losing tons of battery on my steam deck even when turned fully off. I had to disable quick boot (in the bios) and its been better but of course takes longer to boot
My previous laptop was fine - it lost a few percent per day. Now with s0ix, it’s more like 10 or 20% per day. Is just turn it off if it weren’t fit the fact that it also takes ages to boot for some reason. Sigh. And hibernate doesn’t work with an encrypted disk.
Is sOix this modern “sleep” people are talking about? Idle?
Yeah… I don’t exactly the relationship between S0ix, s2idle, and “modern sleep” - I’m sure there’s some overlap but to me it’s all the same: it’s not old-fashioned S3 sleep, and it just doesn’t work properly. I remember reading that with my laptop specifically, S3 was replaced with S0ix so I’m pretty sure that’s the right term in this case ;)
Hibernate can work with an encrypted disk afaik
There’s some combination of circumstances which prevents it. I think specifically it’s encrypted swap, a kernel setting and maybe something else… I can’t remember, except that when I looked at it I couldn’t be fucked trying to get it sorted.
