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Comment by 1_2__4 | Hacker News Reader

Let's all sit and reflect for a moment that Apple was the first (and for a long time, the only) company that used to get sleep/wake "right".

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And now I'm sad.

This was one of the reasons I never adopted Linux on a laptop. Power management simply never worked. I used Windows for many years on a ThinkPad with Linux in a VM but this felt dirty. Bought a Mac and life was good. Well it was until 10.13. 50% of wake up events I have to log in to a trashed desktop now.

It makes me long for a computer nailed to a bit of ethernet that is never turned off.

Edit: also I just went through hell trying to get a USB to serial converter working on OSX. Not exactly a crap one, a Keysight U1173B with Prolific chipset.

Are you connecting to an external monitor? Sleep Wake still works fine for me. The other thing is that I didn't import anything from backup. It's a clean install.

Nope just internal screen. This was a clean install too. On 2013 rMBP.

Using external displays, and half the time come back from sleep with most of my apps 95% off screen, it's annoying at best.

In my experience there have been problems for a while with sleep/wake if you have external monitors. I'm running 10.12 (work computer, no option for 10.13 yet), and I have three monitors connected to my MBP. I had to adopt a ritual about disconnecting the first screen, then lifting the lid a bit to activate the internal display, then disconnect the other two monitors, then close the lid. Otherwise more often than not when I woke my computer up next it would not have a usable desktop -- the dock would be on a nonexistent screen and could not be found. I got pretty used to using spotlight to load terminal and blind type 'sudo reboot'.

That's similar to my experience when using HDMI cables. Switched to using USB C -> MiniDP cables and things are better now, except since I can't daisy-chain the two monitors with DisplayPort (the rMBP can't drive them both, a Thinkpad happily would) that means two out of the four USB C ports are used up.

Still getting random freezes sleeping and waking though. Especially if I don't open the internal panel before disconnecting the external monitors and USB hub before putting the laptop to sleep.

what did other companies not get right?

Linux specifically has a horrible track record for sleep/battery management in laptops, and worse recovery. Windows used to be far more buggy, but the long XP era a lot of that was fixed by XP SP3.

Aside:

I just wish there was an option in Mac to use "PC Shortcuts" in all my apps... it's the only place where some of the key combinations feel truly alien in most apps. I use a "PC" keyboard, but remap CMD to CTRL, ALT to SUPER/WIN, and CTRL to ALT... but in the end, terminal is awkward, and some other shortcuts are hard.

May take the time to figure out how to get VSCode how I like it with the windows/linux shortcuts, but my key bindings.. find/replace are particularly awkward to remember, and usually resort to mouse menus.

Not just a horrible track record, but the current state is also bad. I have a pretty recent Debian install on a bog standard Lenovo which otherwise runs Linux beautifully. It took days of fiddling with conf files and trying things out to get Suspend and Hibernation to work in a sensible way. The kernel, systemd and Gnome all try to do stuff, but they can't seem to agree on who's responsible for what part of power management. This is something that should work out of the box.

Yes I've been struggling with the latest Mint, 50% of the time on wakeup I just get a black screen and no responsiveness. I've had dual-screensaver issues, incoorect monitors etc. Really makes it feel hackish.

I installed Arch on a T460p, and suspend-to-RAM worked out of the box. (And this has been my experience w/ Thinkpads and Linux for well over a decade now. Now, I don't do suspend-to-disk, because I dislike it.)

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