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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person out there who hasn't got a clue what the point in suspend / hibernate are for. Whenever I use them, it seems to take longer to boot than a complete restart, and half of the times it doesn't boot, and if it does, there is a good chance something is not working.

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Suspend should take less than a second to resume. If not, something's gone wrong. Apple pushed in a big way to get it to a point of waking up from suspend being quick enough that by the time you've opened the screen fully, it's ready.

Hibernate will often take longer than a clean boot — because it has to read all allocated memory from storage into RAM.

No, there are probably other Linux / Windows users who are similarly confused. :-p

Among Mac users, your comment is hard to understand, though. We don't have "suspend" or "hibernate" so we don't think about that. Want to relocate? You close the lid, no thought about it. Get to the new place? Open the lid, and your mac is operational instantaneously - literally as soon as the lid is fully open. Of course, the laptop was in power-save mode while you were relocating, but you don't think of that.

If the Mac laptop starts running out of power while asleep it will in fact hibernate; when it comes back it will display a progress bar as it reloads the contents of memory from disk. (Being able to explicitly tell the system "I know I won't be using you for the rest of the day, please just hibernate so you have tons of battery when I turn you back on next" is something I miss from Windows.)

That's hibernating you're describing. Suspend wakes less time than it takes to open the lid and the laptop is directly usable.

HP Zbook 15 with Ubuntu here. Boot to an empty desktop: 15 seconds, typing the password included. I timed that days ago out of curiosity. Resume from suspend to RAM: maybe 2 seconds to the password prompt, plus all my programs are open and in the state I left them before suspending. I never tried hybernating to disk but I bet moving 16 GB of RAM back and forth to disk wouldn't be as fast, even to SSD (I got a dual disk system SSD+HD).

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