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Comment by benoau | Hacker News Reader

"It just works" sleep and hibernate.

"Slide left or right" CPU and GPU underclocking.

“it just works” sleep was working, at least on basically every laptop I had the last 10 years…

until the new s2idle stuff that Microsoft and Intel have foisted on the world (to update your laptop while sleeping… I guess?)

From what I read, it was a lot of the prosumer/gamer brands (MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS) implementing their part of sleep/hibernate badly on their motherboards. Which honestly lines up with my experience with them and other chips they use (in my case, USB controllers). Lots of RGB and maybe overclocking tech, but the cheapest power management and connectivity chips they can get (arguably what usually gets used the most by people).

Sleep brokenness is ecosystem-wide. My Thinkpad crashes/freezes during sleep 3 times a week. Lenovo serviced/replaced it 3 times to no avail.

I have had never any sleep issues with my Macs.

And my wife's Macbook Air wakes itself up again if it tries to suspend when connected to a Dell monitor. Apple has plenty of bugs too, and only Apple can fix them.

It never really worked in games even with S3 sleep. The new connected standby stuff created new issues but sleeping a laptop while gaming was a roulette wheel. SteamOS and the like actually work, like maybe 1/100 times I've run into an issue. Windows was 50/50.

Power management is a really hard problem. It's the stickiest of programming problems, a multi-threaded sequence where timing matters across threads (sometimes down to the ns). I'm convinced only devices that have hardware and software made by the same company (Apple, Andoid phones, Steam deck, maybe Surface laptops) have a shot in hell at getting it perfect. The long-tail/corner cases and testing is a nightmare.

As an example, if you have a mac, run "ioreg -w0 -p IOPower" and see all the drivers that have to interact with each other to do power management.

Sleep and hibernate don't just work on Windows unless Microsoft work with laptop and boards manufacturers to make Windows play nice with all those drivers. It's inevitable that it's hit and miss on any other OS that manufacturers don't care much about. Apple does nearly everything inside their walls, that's why it just works.

“It just works” sadly isn’t true across the Apple Ecosystem anymore.

Liquid Glass ruined multitasking UX on my iPad. :(

Also my macbook (m4 pro) has random freezes where finder becomes entirely unresponsive. Not sure yet why this happens but thankfully it’s pretty rare.

Regardless of how it must be implemented, if this is a desirable feature then this explanation isn’t an absolution of Linux but rather an indictment: its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature.

(And same for Windows to the degree it is more inconsistent on Windows than Mac)

It's not the development model at fault here. It's the simple fact that Windows makes up nearly the entire user base for PCs. Companies make sure their hardware works with Windows, but many don't bother with Linux because it's such a tiny percentage of their sales.

Except when it doesn't. I can't upgrade my Intel graphics drivers to any newer version than what came with the laptop or else my laptop will silently die while asleep. Internet is full of similar reports from other laptop and graphics manufacturers and none have any solutions that work. The only thing that reliably worked is to restore the original driver version. Doesn't matter if I use the WHQL version(s) or something else.

> Regardless of how it must be implemented, if this is a desirable feature then this explanation isn’t an absolution of Linux but rather an indictment: its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature.

The problem is: the specifications of ACPI are complex, Windows' behavior tends to be pretty much trash and most hardware tends to be trash too (AMD GPUs for example were infamous for not being resettable for years [1]), which means that BIOSes have to work around quirks on both the hardware and software. Usually, as soon as it is reasonably working with Windows (for a varying definition of "reasonably", that is), the ACPI code is shipped and that's it.

Unfortunately, Linux follows standards (or at least, it tries to) and cannot fully emulate the numerous Windows quirks... and on top of that, GPUs tend to be hot piles of dung requiring proprietary blobs that make life even worse.

[1] https://www.nicksherlock.com/2020/11/working-around-the-amd-...

> its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature.

The real problem is that the hardware vendors aren't using its development model. To make this work you either need a) the hardware vendor to write good drivers/firmware, or b) the hardware vendor to publish the source code or sufficient documentation so that someone else can reasonably fix their bugs.

The Linux model is the second one. Which isn't what's happening when a hardware vendor doesn't do either of them. But some of them are better than others, and it's the sort of thing you can look up before you buy something, so this is a situation where you can vote with your wallet.

A lot of this is also the direct fault of Microsoft for pressuring hardware vendors to support "Modern Standby" instead of rather than in addition to S3 suspend, presumably because they're organizationally incapable of making Windows Update work efficiently so they need Modern Standby to paper over it by having it run when the laptop is "asleep" and then they can't have people noticing that S3 is more efficient. But Microsoft's current mission to get everyone to switch to Linux appears to be in full swing now, so we'll see if their efforts on that front manage to improve the situation over time.

The feature itself works. There are just hardware that is buggy and don't support it properly.

That's a vastly different statement.

I should have said ‘product development’ model versus just ‘development’ to be more clear. To state another way: Linux has no way, no function, no pathway to providing this. This is not really surprising, because it isn’t the work software developers find fun and self-rewarding, but rather more the relatively mundane business-as-usual scope of product managers and business development folks.

… And that’s all fine, because this is a super niche need: effectively nobody needs Linux laptops and even fewer depend on sleep to work. If ‘Linux’ convinced itself it really really needed to solve this problem for whatever reason, it would do something that doesn’t look like its current development model, something outside that.

Regardless, the net result in the world today is that Linux sleep doesn’t work in general.

Sleep has always worked on my desktop with a random Asus board from the early 2020s with no issues aside from one Nvidia driver bug earlier this year (which was their fault not MS's). Am I just really lucky?

On my Framework 13 AMD : Sleep just works on Fedora. Sleep is unreliable on Windows; if my fans are all running at full speed while running a game and I close the lid to begin sleeping, it will start sleeping and eventually wake up with all fans blaring.

I don't understand this comment in this context. Both of these features work on my Steam Deck. Neither of them have worked on any Windows laptop my employers have foisted upon me.

That requires driver support. What you're seeing is Microsoft's hardware certification forcing device vendors to care about their products. You're right that this is lacking on Linux, but it's not a slight on the kernel itself.

Both of these have worked fine for the last 15 years or so on all my laptops.

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