I've not seen sleep issues on MacOS or Windows for over ten years. You close the lid it sleeps, you open the lid it wakes. Seems reliable.
The user wasn't able to connect to our guest 802.1X (EAP, 802.11n) wireless network using their Ubuntu laptop. MacOS clients and Windows clients have no issue (it is a guest network, non-employees use it often).
That was a pain to set up, and I switched to their alternative network that permitted whitelisted MAC IDs pretty quickly.
Also, I've noticed that recently, when I connect to certain guest networks at office buildings and libraries and so forth, there is a "login" page where you consent to not look at porn or whatever on their connection that you are supposed to be automatically redirected to when you first connect and try to load a page.
Sometimes the redirect doesn't work, and you are forbidden from loading pages until you've clicked the button on the page it failed to send you to. Going to 1.1.3.1 or 192.168.1.1 or some variant usually finds it.
But for the most part! I have not had any issues with normal "type the password into the WPA network" or "associate with the unsecured network". See my other comment in this chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881305
And in the worst case, I always have my phone with me, rooted with unlimited 4G and a USB cable to tether it with.
YMMV.
These kinds of things are also part of why I switched to OS X in 2003-ish, so I understand the hesitation.
In my experience, Linux is perfectly fine nowadays for these things. I've been traveling a bit recently (and so have been using a lot more random WiFi access points, tethering with my phone, and relying on battery for power), and everything's pretty much just worked for me.
My company's development team is just about 50/50 Linux/Mac now, and I haven't seen any real difference between the two sides with issues for WiFi. In fact, I've probably seen more difficulty on the Mac side recently: I feel like the last few versions of OS X have had the habit of randomly dropping WiFi connections sometimes. One of my friends has an MBP that will drop a connection & refuse to reconnect until restarted (or at least he hasn't yet found a solution that doesn't involve restarting).
It's possible a lot of the issues people report might be down to hardware/distribution choices: not all hardware support is equal, and not all Linux distributions are equal. FWIW I use Arch Linux on a ThinkPad.
That all might sounds a little "works on my machine", but I'm not trying to say that the contrary stories of people having a terrible time aren't valid concerns. What I am saying is that many Linux users have perfectly stable & pleasant experiences, and many Mac/Windows users don't have stable/pleasant experiences, so ultimately YMMV regardless of what setup you choose.
The flip side is for the work I do nowadays, I usually use a Linux VM on something like Digital Ocean. There was at one point I was using a 2011 11" Mac Air to dev work.
If you have Nvidia or AMD GPUs, some other wifi vendors (cough broadcom cough) then there can be issues due to drivers, firmware, binary blobs etc. They manifest as suspend/resume issues, wifi flakiness etc.
So yes you can do it by selecting component vendors, but in general 100% of systems will not be robust.
What? I'm running Arch with i3 right now, and networkmanager (with nm-applet for my tray) is doing just fine at finding and associating with networks. `systemctl suspend` suspends my system as desired. I'm sure if I spent some time looking, I could bind it to my power button or laptop lid.
If your complaint is that user shouldn't have to use the command line to suspend their device - I've used Ubuntu versions since 12.04 and they all have this sort of thing built in and intuitively accessible.
Were you referring to something besides network and power management?
Suspend works fine.
(IIRC suspend issues are mostly due to proprietary drivers, which is basically nVidia and AMD to a smaller extent (AMD's open source drivers work well))
That was why I was asking if the state of things for Linux has improved now that it is 2016. Thanks for sharing.