Suspend-then-Hibernate Needs to be Supported and Enabled by Default
For officially supported Linux distributions, suspend-then-hibernate ought to be configured and enabled by default. As a long time user of both Windows and Linux, I’m shocked by the push back that often comes from the vocal Linux community. When Linux is used as a desktop OS, missing out on this feature isn’t likely to cause an issue and is often neglected; however, for everyday use in a laptop, suspend-then-hibernate is a critical feature to have! While I realize there are ways for Linux savvy users to manually configure suspend-then-hibernate (including support for disk encryption and other battery saving configurations), in practice it’s a massive burden (e.g. I shouldn’t have to compile and sign my own kernel, manually re-partition drives to create adequate swap, etc.). This, I believe, is an opportunity for the Framework developer team(s) to meaningfully enhance their user’s experience.
Welcome back to the forums, appreciate sharing your thoughts.
can’t find much resource on the topic, could the feature be not mature enough to warrant inclusion on distros?
That’s a fair assumption. In my limited searching, I haven’t found an analogous hardware/OS configuration where this feature is enabled by default (e.g. the best comparison I can think of is System76, but even then this feature isn’t implemented). In general, I’m most surprised by the consensus to simply use sleep and ignore the issue… Overall, I suppose my ask then is for OEMs (such as Framework) to help influence the distro community to add support. Thanks for lending an ear!
Hibernation can be made to work on Linux but it is not enabled by default AND if you have an encrypted drive it is even more difficult to setup. This is to say that the Linux crowd has already been giving hibernation the cold shoulder for a decade + at this point. Since hibernation is a critical component to suspend then hibernate it tracks that this isn’t something the internet is crawling with by way of guides.
Also expecting Framework to affect software changes that would impact a lot of users not just Framework customers, is unrealistic. Especially considering that the Framework team is kind of short on software engineers.
On the other hand, THAT Framework supports Linux distros officially is already light years ahead of what most companies are willing to do. Does System76 include hibernation out of the box for their laptops, let alone suspend then hibernate? Nope.
If they don’t have it, and they do have software engineers on tap for their own distro and soon their own desktop environment then, I think expecting it from Framework is a little unrealistic.
Furthermore it is officially the responsibility of the distro you are using to make these changes. Petitioning them is the most likely path to getting what you are asking for.
Hibernate to swapfile on an an encrypted drive is surprisingly easy these days.
There does indeed seem to be a group of people being quite anti hibernate. I am personally not a fan of unencrypted hibernate cause that writes stuff to disk that really never should be there but encrypted hibernate is pretty much a killer feature for desktop/laptop use.
Hibernate also needs a lot less hardware support than sleep so it does tend to need a lot less of a “warm” shoulder from the linux crowd. It’s just “boot relatively normally then load state from swap” and not “tell hardware to partially shut down then trust hardware to come back in a somewhat expected state”.
Enabling suspend then hibernate would probably mask some of the “high power use during sleep” issues but validating it working may indeed be outside of the resources framework currently has.
For what it’s worth Nobara (fedora based) ships this by default with their custom calamares installer. It currently uses a separate partition but there is actually no need to do this with a btrfs-subvol
It’s trivial to add to a existing fedora install by creating a quota based btrfs subvol and then adding the block offset addition to the kernel for the subvol to be used for hibernate.
Yes this is the gaming specific distro that I have been meaning to try for a while. Are you saying that it runs on the Framework laptops well? I would think so but have never seen anyone talking about it.
Yes it works perfectly with the current 39 based release. It even includes plasma 6 backports OOTB. Generally a new release will come out about a month or so after the Fedora release. But 39 is perfectly good on the fw13 (and on the x13 Gen4 - which is effectively the same machine from lenovo)