In 8 hours it uses 20% of the battery. When Windows or Mac are put to sleep, the damn things can sleep for a week! This is the case with Linux on multiple laptops.
Is there some kind of manipulation going by ring -1 that detects Linux is running? Is Linux not respecting some procedure and kissing a step?
Too much screentime before bed?
I just want the option to put my Linux laptop into S3 ACPI power State. Daim you modern W11 hardware and S0!!!
Power state? Is that what’s going on?
Always wondered this. My steam deck dies in a day if put to sleep or hibernate.
Really, hibernate as well? On my linux desktop and laptops, hibernate completely cuts the power. It’s definitely possible that this works differently for a handheld device, though, and I don’t think I even tried using hibernate on an ARM device.
I kept losing tons of battery on my steam deck even when turned fully off. I had to disable quick boot (in the bios) and its been better but of course takes longer to boot
if the battery dies during hibernate, it’s not hibernating
incidentally I have been using linux for years and have never had a working hibernation setup. I’m convinced it’s a hoax at this point
Works great with HP Elitebooks G3–G4; honestly, worked great on any HP I’ve used. Might’ve worked on the Dells I’d used but they had other problems and didn’t last very long so I don’t remember.
But I’ve largely used older laptops so I’m not sure if the hardware, specifically, may have anything to do with it.
I’ve been using it pretty consistently for years, I achieve uptimes upwards of 60 days like this. The downside is that it takes kinda long to enter that state and there’s a chance that it fails to enter it (though it doesn’t crash, just goes to the screenlock), especially on my laptop - it refuses to go into hibernation unless I kill most webbrowser windows, especially stuff like YouTube.
And you do need a pretty large swap space; with those super long uptimes, even swap size = ram size isn’t always enough, because sometimes the swap space is actually used as swap and not just as hibernation image storage.
Using swap for hibernate was always insane to me…
Twice your RAM is the old adage.
its annoying. i cope with the sleep then hibernate after 30min setting
I use CachyOS and enabled some serious battery saving techniques:
- https://nowhere.dk/2026/03/hibernation-on-cachyos-with-gnome-grub-btrfs-and-fde/
- https://meganerd.nl/blog/enable-hibernation-in-cachyos-alongside-zram-swap-with-full-disk-encryption-on-btrfs
- https://github.com/wildurbear/CHF
s2idle (although stupid name) is the best option. And also install all the tlp stuff.
Those things together made my machine incredible. (X13 gen3 and a P15 Gen1)
I mean, it is more than thirty years and has lots of responsibility… That or lack of melatonin
When I put windows to sleep it just wake up in middle of the night to install whatever update, restart and slowly empty it battery until it die.
I’ve found on my corpo dell-
Disable wifi
Sleep from start menu
Wait until fan stops spinning
Close lidI find my laptop suffocating itself in my bag every single time i don’t. This way, it only does that 1 in 10 times.
Sleep on Windows 11 is horrendous. It appears to be little more than locking the session and turning off the screen.
No idea if this applies to a lot of laptops, but on my HP with an i5-8350U every Linux distro I’ve tried seems to come configured using s2idle instead of deep sleep, and battery will drain very quickly even in ‘sleep’ mode.
If running
cat /sys/power/mem_sleepreturns “[s2idle] deep” then you can addmem_sleep_default=deepto your kernel args and it will actually go to sleep properly.On Fedora this was
sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="mem_sleep_default=deep"but it varies by distro.Why it seems like every distro I’ve used has this set incorrectly I do not know, it’s baffling.
Interesting. “s2Idle” sounds like it’s idling and wasting cycles when it’s supposed to be sleeping. I’ll try those commands.
Also perplexing to me that idle is chosen as a default.
Some modern laptops only have s2idle which is garbage. I had to re-enabling hibernate on mine and just use that instead of sleep now.
From what I heard, the sleep mode on the steam deck is just the default linux sleep mode. It works almost flawlessly.
I don’t think it’s quite true though because I can leave it in sleep mode for days and it just fires back up where it left off with almost no noticeable battery drain. If I put my desktop pc to sleep (bazzite) it acts like a stroke victim. IF it manages to wake up. Usually it just has to be restarted so I don’t waste my time and just shut it down now.
SWAP avenger here. And they said SWAP partitions were old hat… Pah!
I have an Acer Swift 3:2 running Manjaro with a swap partition encrypted with LUKS2. I recently got a new laptop so poor old Swifty been languishing in a messenger bag.
The important distinction here being that my lid is tied to hibernate, not sleep, because fuck sleep mode… why do I want my laptop in “low power mode”? So I can charge it as soon as I open it? No thanks!
Three months pass. Crap can’t seem to connect to my VNC over SSH, hmm, what to do… I wonder if my Acer can connect?
Pull old Swifty out of the bag, open it up, enter decryption key, it’s on in moments, 95% battery.
Skill issue? (I’m joking, or am I?) 🐸
Hibernate is suspend to disk, power off. There is almost zero power consumption. You’ll lose more just to thermodynamics.
Exactly, that’s why I choose it on all of my mobile systems. It also survives power outages which is important in storm-prone geographies.
I’ve only used windows at work in the past 10 years or so but my windows experience with sleep was far far worse.
My laptop would always wake up in my bag on my hour+ commute. The laptop would be scorching hot and the battery dead by the time I got to the office. Every time.
Never experienced that in Linux.
Recently I switched to a Linux computer at work and it’s much better in every regard.
My personal desktop (runs arch (btw)), did have some trouble with sleep recently tho…I replaced my 5700G with a 5600X3D and it would refuse to wake from sleep, necessitating a hard shutdown (by PSU switch!)…but I think that was a bios bug. My bios was already very close to latest but I think upgrading that was what ultimately fixed it. Now it works fine.
I’ve always had this Windows issue you described with ThinkPads. Never had a problem with Dells though. Drives me absolutely crazy
Aren’t Dell and Lenovo one company now?
Was the only solution to the sleeping problem on Windows to switch laptops?
Every piece of shit windows laptop since they flipped from S3 sleep to “modem standby.” garbage. Thing wakes up in the bag at the slightest whiff of wifi. “Oh! Network! Want me to connect so I can install updates, delete all your pinned tabs, break a few apps, and infect notepad with AI slop vulnerabilities? No answer? That must mean you want that - doing it now, boss!” <melts in bag>
Dell, Lenovo, and Surface laptops all do the same shit. I fucking hate windows.
Dell support even told me, with a straight face, that if I didn’t fully shut down my laptop before putting in my bag that I’d void the warranty.
Dell support even told me, with a straight face, that if I didn’t fully shut down my laptop before putting in my bag that I’d void the warranty.
That’s insane, what the fuck? BTW, the owner of Dell is a right-wing dude who supports DHH. I’m not surprised they they have such shitty customer service.
Does it? I have a really old sony vaio that last more than a week suspended.
Debian has worked fine on my old laptop, probably only a few days for me but the battery is a decade old or so.
Kubuntu on my laptop sleeps really well, I can leave it in my backpack for days and it will lose less than 10%, better than when it was running Windows
