Comment by karlmdavis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karlmdavis | Hacker News Reader

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- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: More stable dock/undock and sleep/wake handling.

- DESCRIPTION:

I've noticed that my system often hangs unrecoverably with a blank screen during dock/undock and sleep/wake events. I've learned, though, that I can reduce the likelihood of having problems by trying to minimize the number of state changes that the system has to handle at once. For example, if I'm leaving the house with the laptop, I'll first open the lid, wait 10 seconds to see if the display wants to turn on or not, undock it, wait 10 seconds for it to adjust, and only then put it to sleep. Same thing waking it up: one step at a time, with 10 second pauses in between. Seems to reduce my problems by about 90%. As a developer, this screams "race conditions" to me, but what do I know? If there's a bug filed for this already, I wouldn't know -- no idea what I'd search for.

I take the uptime game pretty seriously: having to reboot means that I lose a ton of context. Right now, I've got nine separate workspaces/desktops going, all with several browser, terminal, etc. windows. A reboot means I'll spend anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes installing updates and recovering all of that state. It's painful. Right now, my system has only been up for 9 days, which is weak sauce.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: software developer in the federal government

It's kind of crazy how long this has been a problem and across many different hardware configs. Sleep doesn't work on my desktop or on a windows laptop with standard intel everything.

As a side note, the same issue persist on Windows with HP current gen EliteBook and Office. Everytime I undock the notebook, MS Outlook gets disconnected and it simply refuses to reconnect. The only option is to close Outlook and open it again - but waiting 30s between closing and starting again otherwise some locks on the PST file are still in place and Outlook would hang on start forever. The only way to fix it then, is by a Windows reboot. That they killed the QA department was the dumbest idea ever, now things are so buggy.

Just want to note I have similar problems on MacOS especially when using multiple monitors. I.E. one monitor will work and the other won't until I restart.

Yeah, I've had intermittent suspend/resume issues with nearly every laptop I've tried linux on.

My current xps 13 is the only one I've ever used where it works 100% reliably.

Interesting. I did a test run of the new xps 13 the other day and it had all sorts of issues with a stock install.

What sorts of issues? I've tried a multitude of distros on it and provided that it has a recent kernel (4.8 or newer, so if you tried 16.04 you'd want to make sure you're running the HWE stack) everything seems to work really well.

The only hardware related issue I've had has been static background noise from the headphone jack (which I also see on a clean install of windows), but I was able to get past that with the steps here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_(9350)#Hiss...

I had this same problem. I switched back to nouveau drivers for my Nvidia card, instead of the proprietary drivers, and everything works perfectly. I also seem to be getting better overall performance in day-to-day desktop activities and battery life. I don't really do anything that needs 3d other than the desktop compositor.

When I was using he non-open-source drivers, Ctrl-Alt-F# to change virtual terminals would sometimes help. I would switch to a random virtual terminal and back and sometimes it would be working again.

Sadly, the ctrl+alt+f# trick doesn't work for me (OP). I wish!

And btw (should have mentioned this): ThinkPad W530 running nVidia drivers.

nVidia soft hang issues are super annoying. since mine is always plugged in, i just set my laptop to never suspend.

+1 Happens all the time. Can't tell specifically what the cause is. Most common seems to be the display hangs after unplugging HDMI while the laptop was in sleep mode.

I've found myself able to access my computer for a good while before the lock screen would turn on after a wake sometimes.

+1000

My ubuntu laptop has now became a stationary computer permanently stuck to the docking station and i never put it to sleep because I'm scared every time i unplug or plug in an external device. Anything from the most simple USB keyboard to ethernet, to VGA monitor, HDMI/DP/DVI monitors, USB3 docking station, close laptop lid, wake from sleep... EVERYTHING has a big chance that the hot plug will fail and you either have to reboot for the device to be detected or in worst case the OS just freezes.

This is a must fix for ubuntu to ever be viable as a desktop OS.

I use tmux-resurrect for this exact reason. Between that and Chrome's session restore I end up in an OK state after a reboot.

+1 for fixing this issue, just trying to work around it in the meantime.

Yes please!! So painful. I also have dozens of applications open, all the time, which I lose when I dock/undock when in sleep...

So much this! _If_ it succeeds in waking up from standby, only 2 of my 3 monitors work, this means I end up rebooting anyways...

This is actually one of the main reasons I am thinking of switching to a Mac. It's really hard to live with all these 'black-screen-after-lock' moments. If that could work as it does in MacOS/Windows, I'd probably never switch.

I am experiencing this when I resume with a VPN connection on.

Even though it doesn't take me much time to recover state its really annoying to know that I have to figure out all these issues anytime I start using a Linux laptop.

My laptop, everytime I open from sleep, is starts but it donesn't turn on the screen. I have to close and reopen, then it turn on the LCD.

this is one of the main reasons i don't use linux on laptop

A huge +.

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