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Comment by egeozcan | Hacker News Reader

The sleeping is so broken on all the laptops these days that I'm seriously considering buying an old laptop because all the nice things you get with a modern powerful laptop aren't worth it if the battery is randomly empty and you can't turn it off.

It's astonishingly inexplicably broken and the industry completely ignores it.

I have 0 idea why.

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I can't decide if I'm incredibly lucky or what, but I never had broken sleep in the last decade on Linux.

For me, that has technically been the case on Linux, too, including on the laptop I was referring to. On Windows, it happens that the screen will be garbled on wake, but I don't use Windows that much to care.

The only issue is that s2idle drains the battery like crazy compared to S3. But I guess "it's not a bug / works as intended".

> The only issue is that s2idle drains the battery like crazy compared to S3.

Properly working s2idle should use as little power as S3, but it seems to be much more common with s2idle that some piece of hardware is left enabled while it should have been disabled to save power.

> Properly working s2idle

Does anyone actually have that? I'd really love to hear with which hardware/software!

Well it seems that in theory it should exist, amd_s2idle script that tests various things. I can get the machine into what seems to be sleep, but if you listen careful on the fan you will hear that it's constantly restarting. The script then reports that most of the time is actually spent in user space, when what it should really do is spend over 90% in actual idle. Unfortunately no one seems to have a good answer on how I can find out what causes the user space sleep inhibitions. It's not a wakeup.

AMD has this https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/blob/master/scripts...

This is interesting. On my HPs, both Intel and AMD, the fan-on-while-it-should-be-sleeping thing only happens with Windows. Under Linux, the fan will turn off even if it was spinning, say if I put it to sleep during a compile and the laptop is hot.

On Linux, the fan never turns on and the pc never gets warm while asleep. Windows sometimes does something that requires the fan to spin like crazy, and the PC is usually somewhat warm to the touch.

It is very hardware dependent. So you have to get ~lucky with your machine and then you're set, basically. (Though it's a weighted distribution; ex. ThinkPads have better than average odds)

> It is very hardware dependent.

NVIDIA GPUs definitely make things more difficult, at least in the suspend-then-hibernate case. Here's where I reported a hacky workaround:

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/systemds-suspend-then-...