Actually - you can put it into sleep mode, and after a while switch to suspend mode (where it dumps the memory content to disk and powers off).
Thing is, as linux boots up so fast, I tend to always shut it off when not needed in the near future anyway. But on my current work dell latitude 7400 device it works pretty well.
To be honest, I think users would boycott Microsoft if you had to reboot your system for AV updates :}
Very honestly, I have one gaming Rig running Windows - all the remaining computers run Linux. I never spent so much time looking at an upgrade screen as under Windows. And sometimes, it is not one but several reboots that are required. And the worst part is: You can’t work on your device while the upgrades are being applied (against downloaded and prepared!)
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In my experience linux sleep works well, and windows sleep doesn’t exist. The difference between linux and windows sleep is one of the reasons why SteamOS on the steam deck is a much better experience than windows on a handheld (among plenty of others).
One anecdote to moderate your expectations: on this 11th gen Framework 13, if I use “deep” sleep and only connect USB-C expansion cards, sleep basically works, draining in the vicinity of 1% to 1.5% battery life per hour. It wakes up reasonably fast, with a delay (10 seconds? something like that), how computers used to be.
If I do anything else, standby is a disaster. Battery dies way too fast. This is still an improvement on the Windows laptop I got from work, but that’s not saying anything.
I’ll note here that hibernation in my experience, is not necessarily as reliable. Sleep stores system state in ram, and hibernation stores it on disk for further reduced power draw and stability. However, I cannot reliably resume from hibernation on my machine thanks to a bug between the linux kernel and the ssd’s firmware that results in the hibernate partition not being discoverable sometimes on power resume.
I believe windows has also moved away from using hibernate and disables it by default now.
What SSD are you using?
Samsung 970 Evo
Hopefully the WD Black SN850X that FW is shipping works better with Linux hibernation.
I couldn’t re-find the doc for it, but I remember it only affected Samsung and one other brand’s drives (not WD). I think it may have been Kingston.
@RandomRanger As of 02/01/2024, hibernate is still enabled by default in windows.
The problem with both hibernate and sleep is neither one was designed for an era of constant WAN/LAN access, massive quantities of ram, SSDs, or anything resembling security. They both came out of eras of dial-up, ISA+jumpers, LBA mode HDDs, <16MB of ram in systems with no wifi and laughable security (by todays standards). Windows was new, Linux was still a weird niche version of Unix made by some Linus kid, and Apple was really only used by professionals.
NO ONE should use sleep or hibernate these days without some unique use cases:
- UEFI doesnt like it. laundry list of reasons why. It’s only still there because buyers would pitch a fit if it wasn’t; theres better options but people hate to change.
- The security issues are terrible (I can use hibernate to bypass TPM for example) and any good security dept will block its use.
- The chances of full data loss if they dont work right is high. I averaged 3 a year out of 350 local users until I removed it from available options and locked it out. My other locations were about the same. Company size was 4500.
- Yes, even sleep creates heat. Before I locked out sleep I had 2 sales guys in 2 months fly cross pacific and literally burn out their CPUs because they put them to sleep and then stuffed them into luggage. That was before we had M.2 FF drives; I can only imagine the thermal bullets I’ve dodged since.
If you really need that kind of functionality, install a VM and run your system in that. Pause it, then properly shutdown the laptop. I set all mine to do nothing at all when lids get closed and to 100% shut down when the power button is hit. If youre on an SSD its 2-5 seconds to get back into your OS, and maybe another 5 to spin up the VM. If the VM chokes, you thank your god it wasnt a real PC, just a VM, and restore it.
I’ll tell you from lots and lots of experience, its not worth the trouble youll have when eventually the odds run out and you get bit.
While on that subject, In Windows, watch for settings buried in the power profiles that ‘spin down’ SSDs, or turn off the PCIe, Wifi, and USB. It sucks when your laptop tries to conserve power by disabling your Wifi, all your USB ports, and then puts your SSD firmware into a suspend state. It’ll ‘sleep’ itself right to death while you try and figure out why it wont wake up.
Actually, the sleep and hibernate was used because boot up times were very high in general. (Remember the times where there were literally competitions on how fast a system could boot up?)
I do not use sleep or hibernate anymore as under Linux Plasma/KDE, I have the session management taking care of “storing” the session when I shutdown, and it barely takes 10secs. to shutdown, and 4 to boot up. And if the KDE is told to restore the previous session, that’s what it does! :}
Most apps play their part now. I can happen that an application is not able to store the current session, but you learn that pretty fast.
And - the reflex to always save when I do a change on a file etc., helps too :}
Oh, I remember!
First time I saw a regular consumer SSD in action was a pair of newly imaged identical Macbooks a coworker upgraded one in. We could literally power-on/login/restart the SSD model 3.5 times before the HDD model got to even the login screen. The entire company was sold on them after that for daily use.
These days my servers take more time to startup the arrays than they do to load the OS from the drives. It’s just nuts! I LOVE it.
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