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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

There's many OS designs out there.

The Linux kernel is huge, complex and particularly messy in terms of internal structure. This makes even otherwise trivial modifications hard, and complex modifications extremely hard. The development overhead is brutal.

And hibernation just happens to be a scenario that's a nightmare to implement with such a design.

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That might explain why some manufacturers don't invest at all in Linux drivers. However in an alternate reality where they sell Linux laptops and Windows turned into a fringe desktop OS for some 2% people (I'm one of those 2% Linux desktop users), hibernation would work very well on Linux and with some luck on Windows. That despite any possible architecture of the Linux kernel: manufacturers would make it work even with a kernel written in COBOL and drivers written in BASIC in a sandboxed DOS virtual machine. /s

I disagree. The Linux Kernel power management framework is quite simple and easy to understand. The problem is mostly driver implementations, which are usually mostly self-contained. But it is possible to design a driver so that it works well in terms of power management.

I don't think the design of linux really affects this very much. The primary issue with hibernation is the interaction with hardware can be quite complex, and the development effort behind linux drivers is generally less than what goes into the drivers on other platforms (and often has less documentation to go on). The core of linux can handle hibernation just fine in my experience, if you're on hardware which linux supports well enough.

Is that right? Very surpised to learn about this. Messy, brutal, nightmare. I’m running Linux as my primary OS more than a decade and find it very stable compared to Win and Mac which I use when it’s a must.

I wonder how such a messy base offers such stability ...

> I wonder how such a messy base offers such stability ...

By not solving problems like hibernation.

Partially right. I have a DIY machine with Ubuntu. There has been display issues, sound issues, and hibernation issues as well. If you go to Ubuntu's bug report website (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu), there is a huge list of them. It is true for other distros and Windows (internally).

When people are afraid or unable to make changes, you get few breaking changes at all.

Yes, that's right. Linux is severely lacking in internal structure, and it takes a lot of effort to develop for this kernel. It is easily an order of magnitude harder relative to every other kernel I've touched.

I have been running primarily Linux for longer (over two decades) and I am to some extent fond of it. But it is what it is.

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