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?
I mean, it is more than thirty years and has lots of responsibility… That or lack of melatonin
Does it? I have a really old sony vaio that last more than a week suspended.
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.
Sleep on Windows 11 is horrendous. It appears to be little more than locking the session and turning off the screen.
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 use a kaby lake (7th gen intel i5) laptop, and sleep works well on all linux, freebsd, windows. i’m using s3 sleep, are you on a newer machine that only supports s0ix?
I have the 13th Intel mobile gen and it sucks when it comes to power states
yeah, i think they started getting rid of s3 in favor of s0ix since 11th? 12th? gen. heard it’s shitty. :(
Windows definitely has lot of sleep issues. But yes Linux seems to be as bad or maybe a bit worse. I once shut down my Linux laptop and left it connected to power on my vehicle. When I returned, my vehicle was completely dead 😮💨
On my Linux computer I just close the laptop’s lid and it goes to sleep, consuming almost no battery power. I can open it hours later and have basically the same amount of battery left as before.
But some laptop manufacturers have proprietary systems in place for the sleep mode that are not supported in Linux because it would be a gargantuan effort when the laptop manufacturer refuses to coöperate.
This is the answer.
Proprietary firmware. Fuck Intel.
Laptops with AMD chips are not necessarily better in this regard.
From my anecdotal experience with an HP laptop (from work), with an AMD 7840HS, the blame is often also with the system integrator. That one has a bug in the power management system, where if you plug the charger in during sleep, the power state gets locked to some very low power sleep mode, until you either reboot, or plug the charger in while it’s not asleep.
HP doesn’t want to look at this because they don’t support Linux, meanwhile AMD kernel devs claim that this is probably a BMC bug so they can’t fix it. Whatever the real culprit is in my case, the BMC can do so much these days that it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of sleep issues are due to bad firmware.
Either way, system integrators like HP refusing to support Linux is in part what allows Intel and AMD to ignore a lot of Linux-specific bugs. SIs have a lot of manpower to help diagnose and fix them, and they have leverage when reporting bugs to CPU manufacturers.
Worth noting that this is also an ongoing issue with windows. Only apple has actually solved this, and they do so by owning the whole stack. Each apple product has a specific OS, CPU, and motherboard that were all specifically designed with the end-product user-experience in mind.
But for PCs, the OS, CPU, and motherboard are all designed and built by different companies, each only designed to be generically compatible with the other components. None of them are designed for a specific end-product, so features that require all of the components to play perfectly together for a specific end-user experience (like sleep state) often end up not quite aligning.
None of this helps you, but I think it’s worth understanding why the problem exists and why it may just always exist. The best bet is that companies like System76 or Valve solve sleep states for specific linux-based products, and then the rest of us maybe hopefully see some benefit from that.
But IMO this is just a trade-off. It’s like a pick 2 situation between Customization, Stability, and Privacy (where a reliabile sleep state is Stability). You can have stability and customization, but you’ll probably pay a lot, and the company who sold it will want telemetry data to improve the experience for others. You can have stability and privacy, but the product will be very locked down to a specific use case to ensure a stable experience.
It’s not that apple solved it, it’s that Microsoft purposely fucked it up.
It’s called “modern standby” and if you put your laptop to sleep while it is plugged into power, some windows services and wifi aren’t actually put to sleep, and instead will ping windows update servers to download and install some updates while the machine is “asleep”.
Even if and when you put the laptop to sleep while plugged into power and then remove power to say out the laptop in your bag. Those services that aren’t put to sleep never check to see if you are still on wall power or battery and keep doing what they do draining the battery
Linus tech tips on YouTube did a whole deep dive into it. Some laptops you can disable modern standby through the command prompt but newer hardware doesn’t allow for it. The only real workaround is unplug your laptop for a few seconds before putting it to sleep.
As I understand it, apple products support the same update from sleep feature, except it works for all the reasons stated above.
I’m pretty sure all Microsoft needed to do was put in a check to see if it was running on battery or not. And I remember seeing that they finally fixed it months ago.
Modern windows is bogged down by decades old compatibility architecture. Shit programed in the 80s will still run on modern windows for the most part. All because corporations and businesses still run those programs or severs today and refuse to update or replace them. Look at the fucking US aviation industry. Billions of dollars in revenue and still run windows 95 level shit programs.
Microsoft needs to pull an apple and rebuild windows from the ground up without any compatibility layers. Enough is enough.
Components like CPUs and mainboards are absolutely purpose-built for laptops. And precisely this has caused a host of issues from locked-down BIOS/UEFI to broken sleep to incompatibility with real-time audio processing via ASIO, and that’s just the ones I have personally experienced.
The real issue here is an outdated x86 architecture that was never designed for efficiency, which is severely struggling to compete with Apple’s ARM-based M architecture, but which they can’t get rid of for compatibility reasons.
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.
No rest for the wicked?
Too much screentime before bed?
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.
Debian has worked fine on my old laptop, probably only a few days for me but the battery is a decade old or so.
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.
