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?
I mean, it is more than thirty years and has lots of responsibility… That or lack of melatonin
Does it? I have a really old sony vaio that last more than a week suspended.
From what I heard, the sleep mode on the steam deck is just the default linux sleep mode. It works almost flawlessly.
I don’t think it’s quite true though because I can leave it in sleep mode for days and it just fires back up where it left off with almost no noticeable battery drain. If I put my desktop pc to sleep (bazzite) it acts like a stroke victim. IF it manages to wake up. Usually it just has to be restarted so I don’t waste my time and just shut it down now.
Sleep on Windows 11 is horrendous. It appears to be little more than locking the session and turning off the screen.
I use CachyOS and enabled some serious battery saving techniques:
- https://nowhere.dk/2026/03/hibernation-on-cachyos-with-gnome-grub-btrfs-and-fde/
- https://meganerd.nl/blog/enable-hibernation-in-cachyos-alongside-zram-swap-with-full-disk-encryption-on-btrfs
- https://github.com/wildurbear/CHF
s2idle (although stupid name) is the best option. And also install all the tlp stuff.
Those things together made my machine incredible. (X13 gen3 and a P15 Gen1)
On my Linux computer I just close the laptop’s lid and it goes to sleep, consuming almost no battery power. I can open it hours later and have basically the same amount of battery left as before.
But some laptop manufacturers have proprietary systems in place for the sleep mode that are not supported in Linux because it would be a gargantuan effort when the laptop manufacturer refuses to coöperate.
This is the answer.
Proprietary firmware. Fuck Intel.
Laptops with AMD chips are not necessarily better in this regard.
From my anecdotal experience with an HP laptop (from work), with an AMD 7840HS, the blame is often also with the system integrator. That one has a bug in the power management system, where if you plug the charger in during sleep, the power state gets locked to some very low power sleep mode, until you either reboot, or plug the charger in while it’s not asleep.
HP doesn’t want to look at this because they don’t support Linux, meanwhile AMD kernel devs claim that this is probably a BMC bug so they can’t fix it. Whatever the real culprit is in my case, the BMC can do so much these days that it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of sleep issues are due to bad firmware.
Either way, system integrators like HP refusing to support Linux is in part what allows Intel and AMD to ignore a lot of Linux-specific bugs. SIs have a lot of manpower to help diagnose and fix them, and they have leverage when reporting bugs to CPU manufacturers.
Worth noting that this is also an ongoing issue with windows. Only apple has actually solved this, and they do so by owning the whole stack. Each apple product has a specific OS, CPU, and motherboard that were all specifically designed with the end-product user-experience in mind.
But for PCs, the OS, CPU, and motherboard are all designed and built by different companies, each only designed to be generically compatible with the other components. None of them are designed for a specific end-product, so features that require all of the components to play perfectly together for a specific end-user experience (like sleep state) often end up not quite aligning.
None of this helps you, but I think it’s worth understanding why the problem exists and why it may just always exist. The best bet is that companies like System76 or Valve solve sleep states for specific linux-based products, and then the rest of us maybe hopefully see some benefit from that.
But IMO this is just a trade-off. It’s like a pick 2 situation between Customization, Stability, and Privacy (where a reliabile sleep state is Stability). You can have stability and customization, but you’ll probably pay a lot, and the company who sold it will want telemetry data to improve the experience for others. You can have stability and privacy, but the product will be very locked down to a specific use case to ensure a stable experience.
It’s not that apple solved it, it’s that Microsoft purposely fucked it up.
It’s called “modern standby” and if you put your laptop to sleep while it is plugged into power, some windows services and wifi aren’t actually put to sleep, and instead will ping windows update servers to download and install some updates while the machine is “asleep”.
Even if and when you put the laptop to sleep while plugged into power and then remove power to say out the laptop in your bag. Those services that aren’t put to sleep never check to see if you are still on wall power or battery and keep doing what they do draining the battery
Linus tech tips on YouTube did a whole deep dive into it. Some laptops you can disable modern standby through the command prompt but newer hardware doesn’t allow for it. The only real workaround is unplug your laptop for a few seconds before putting it to sleep.
As I understand it, apple products support the same update from sleep feature, except it works for all the reasons stated above.
Components like CPUs and mainboards are absolutely purpose-built for laptops. And precisely this has caused a host of issues from locked-down BIOS/UEFI to broken sleep to incompatibility with real-time audio processing via ASIO, and that’s just the ones I have personally experienced.
The real issue here is an outdated x86 architecture that was never designed for efficiency, which is severely struggling to compete with Apple’s ARM-based M architecture, but which they can’t get rid of for compatibility reasons.
i use a kaby lake (7th gen intel i5) laptop, and sleep works well on all linux, freebsd, windows. i’m using s3 sleep, are you on a newer machine that only supports s0ix?
I have the 13th Intel mobile gen and it sucks when it comes to power states
yeah, i think they started getting rid of s3 in favor of s0ix since 11th? 12th? gen. heard it’s shitty. :(
moth doesn’t know what CPU you use, but newer AMD chips don’t support S3. AMD removed that because they think modern suspend is better, an opinion that doesn’t seem to be shared by the consumers.
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moths thinks you might be experiencing an emotional breakdown. since you are in the US, you can dial 9-8-8 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Hotline. moth hopes you get well in the future.
I like moth. Moth is nice. Thank for being moth.
… what… What happened here?
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If only going to sleep was simple. There’s a bunch of different sleep states. S3 is ram and S4 is hibernate.
Check your supported sleep states. At the command line type cat /sys/power/state
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.4/admin-guide/pm/sleep-states.html
It also doesn’t help that ACPI is a badly-designed mess of a standard. I remember that in the 2010s one of Apple’s selling points was that their laptops had sleep and hibernation that worked every time. Heck, MacOS X could even decide intelligently when to do which. This mostly worked because they fully controlled the hardware, firmware, and software. Other laptop manufacturers could just take their best stab at implementing ACPI power states and hope their implementation matched Microsoft’s.
Microsoft tried to solve the mess by introducing the S0ix ACPI state (aka “Modern Standby”), which was defined in a way that could actually be implemented without too much guesswork. Unfortunately, this was during the Windows 8 era when Microsoft decided that laptops should be more like smartphones so S0ix is much closer to turning your screen off on a phone than to actual standby.
The system randomly waking up and deciding to do work is an explicitly intended feature because what if you get a Teams message while your laptop is in your bag? Sure, you might say that you’d either have Teams on your phone or wouldn’t immediately care but that kind of thinking won’t get you anywhere within Microsoft. Also, Windows actually has very little restraint about what it does when it wakes up so it might decide to install a heavy update or an application might decide it’s important enough to do work right now. While the laptop is in your bag. Cue you wondering if the laptop turned off because the battery’s empty or because it overheated.
And to make things worse Microsoft specified that in order to be allowed to use Modern Standby, the device must not offer S3 (sleep/suspend-to-ram). Some manufacturers still allow you to enable S3 but it’s a legacy feature that’s even less well supported than before.
The system randomly waking up and deciding to do work
My work macbook did this by default as well, among other dumb things like leaving bluetooth enabled on sleep so my headphones would constantly connect to the laptop when on the train trying to listen to music.
Thankfully the waking up thing is just a setting, but by default, imho, mac os’s sleep is also garbage.
I’ve got Sony Bluetooth earbuds a few years back and I guess they have something called “multipoint” where they can connect to multiple devices at once. I had to Google why anyone would want that, but I guess it’s to make switching between devices faster.
Sometimes I’ll be walking down the sidewalk with my earbuds in, connected to the phone in my pocket, and they’ll just randomly make the sound it makes when connecting or disconnecting. Like I’m connecting to the BT of a random house or business I walked past that I never explicitly paired with.
I can’t exactly put my finger on why, but I find it very unsettling every single time and wish I could turn that feature off.
I could not work out why my Sony headphones were giving me a ding sound and then my listening was interrupted with ambient noises. I assumed Bluetooth connection requests at first, but for me it was the “speak to chat” feature that can be disabled.
Huh that’s interesting… I don’t think anyone around me was speaking at the time however.
But if it happens again I’ll keep that possibility in mind.
This is the one I was going to link.
I have my laptop in s2idle mem_sleep most of the time because this boots quick and allows me to wake the computer by pressing a key on my USB keyboard plugged into a hub plugged into my dock into my laptop.
And it gets from my office and back just fine on that. But if I’m traveling or something I’ll switch it to deep mode before I leave so it actually actually goes to sleep in my bag.
It takes extra time and jank to boot, and I have to wake it up by opening the lid, but if I’m traveling that’s normal since I don’t travel with my dock or USB keyboard anyway.
This is one of those cases where it would be nice if the tech always did what I wanted, but I do actually want different things at different times, and so I do actually benefit from the control of being able to choose.
My hardware doesn’t support “shallow” sleep, for whatever reason.
The reason is, as usual, that Microsoft lobbied hard to make their way the standard way of doing sleep modes. Then, when implementing it, they strong armed all the OEM to make hardware fit their nonstandard, slightly off center, way.
So, now windows kind of work with all hardware, but open source is fucked because to make the hardware actually work requires reverse engineering whatever custom crap windows does.
The sleep stuff is part of the ACPI standard, it’s all documented.
It’s up to the motherboard/SoC to support it properly, and Microsoft has an “entire system view” of how Windows works and can integrate it deeply. Compare that to Linux, the companies involved mostly care about servers, and the distros are assembled by disparate groups that don’t have the hardware testing capability that MS or OEMs have.
Is that true for Mac and Windows too? Why do I need to differentiate the two on Linux but not the others? Why isn’t the default the better one?
suspend to RAM (aka sleep) means the computer stays powered on in a very low-power state. Everything in memory is kept as-is, and it consequently draws a little power to keep the RAM active. This makes it very quick to enter this state and to wake up from it.
suspend to disk (aka hibernate) dumps the RAM to disk, and then powers down fully. It takes a little while to dump all RAM to disk and also to restore it.
So “the better one” depends on what works best for your particular circumstances. If you don’t know and want a big corporate entity to make those decisions for you, stick with Microsoft and Apple products. If you would rather take the time to find out what’s best for you, then go FOSS.
“big corporate entity’s decision” sounds very valid for laptop hibernation.
It would be nice for Linux to have the same as the default
It’s something to hassle with on Windows too. Less so on macOS because it’s easier for them to optimize everything when they control the whole software and hardware stack.
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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.
Some modern laptops only have s2idle which is garbage. I had to re-enabling hibernate on mine and just use that instead of sleep now.
I did some searching and it sounds like it just wakes up slightly faster, but even in deep sleep it’s still very fast.
Your system goes to sleep and wakes up? My system goes to sleep and then crashes. We are not the same
My system goes to sleep and won’t wake up. Can’t figure out why. I just turned off the ability to sleep and turn my computer off when not in use.
This is the magic of modernACPI Power States. Normally you would write everything to swap or keep the RAM powered. Nowadays we need always on (W)LAN and event management for updates , notifications and whatever. And if I don’t want that? Where is my Setting for Hibernstion Lenovo!!!
Assuming you have windows, run this in admin powershell It should give you power options you didn’t even know existed.
Apparently the formatting gets all screwed up with the default UI and I am too stupid to figure out how to fix it.
Its appears properly if you use old.lemmy.world though.
Copy and paste everything below this line .-------------------------.
$sting77 = “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings” $querylist = reg query $sting77 foreach ($regfolder in $querylist){ $querylist2 = reg query $regfolder
foreach($2ndfolder in $querylist2){ $active2 = $2ndfolder -replace "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" , "HKLM:" Get-ItemProperty -Path $active2 Set-ItemProperty -Path "$active2" -Name "Attributes" -Value '2' } $active = $regfolder -replace "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" , "HKLM:" Get-ItemProperty -Path $active Set-ItemProperty -Path "$active" -Name "Attributes" -Value '2'}
Your system and me have a lot in common (⌐■_■)
Mine too! Well one of mine, and I still don’t know why just this one. But hey, it’s not like Linux cares if it is crashing, it always comes back.
And so it got called, the Terminaltor.
Windows definitely has lot of sleep issues. But yes Linux seems to be as bad or maybe a bit worse. I once shut down my Linux laptop and left it connected to power on my vehicle. When I returned, my vehicle was completely dead 😮💨
When I put windows to sleep it just wake up in middle of the night to install whatever update, restart and slowly empty it battery until it die.
I’ve found on my corpo dell-
Disable wifi
Sleep from start menu
Wait until fan stops spinning
Close lidI find my laptop suffocating itself in my bag every single time i don’t. This way, it only does that 1 in 10 times.
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.
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.
Also, the failure gets registered forever, for example, in RAID disks you’ll never get a 100% healthy disk with such situation.
