They don't even necessarily care about Windows support. Upgrade to a new version that doesn't quite work the same with the hacks in their cobbled-together drivers, and you're quickly in the same boat as the Linux users.
This hasn't been my experience with Windows in the last 5 years. Truth be told it's pretty stable by now and for me, issues like that are rare. Even things like working with external docking stations are pretty seamless nowadays.
I don't think any of our individual experiences will say much on this topic. It clearly works well enough for some and not for others.
My desktop (custom built) refuses to go to sleep when I'm booted into Linux. Straight up just wakes itself immediately.
Over in Windows land I've had this issue on a regular basis with a Thinkpad that keeps waking itself up. I've had this issue occasionally on a Surface Book 2, I suspect due to a finicky monitor attached to the dock. I've had this issue pretty much never on a first gen Surface Book attached to the same dock. Go figure.
Beh, my laptop (MSI GS65) has trouble waking up from sleep on windows too.
When putting it to sleep on linux it always comes back up, but I have to reboot to get wifi back. On windows wifi comes back, but the ethernet port needs to be disabled & reenabled in the control panel to work. Laptops suck.
Hey I'm also running a GS65 (First Ubuntu - now PopOs), the Wifi is frustrating, but I found double-tapping (2x [FN+F10]) in quick succession would bring the radios back up.
Have you ever gotten the native HDMI port to work in linux?
> Hey I'm also running a GS65 (First Ubuntu - now PopOs), the Wifi is frustrating, but I found double-tapping (2x [FN+F10]) in quick succession would bring the radios back up.
oh wow, okay I'll definitely try that haha
> Have you ever gotten the native HDMI port to work in linux?
This is also true of every ThinkPad Linux system I've used over the last fifteen years, as the ThinkPad is as close to first-party Linux hardware as exists. It's also true for the majority of Windows laptops in the MacBook price range, I assume. I'd also assume that Hackintoshes don't work as smoothly as you describe, which feeds right into the parent commenter's complaint.
The parent commenter just has higher standards than you: either that software and hardware are relatively easily decoupled and should be, or that laptop manufacturers should competently implement the standards they claim to, or even just that he's never worked at a company whose product was as poorly-made as almost every laptop's compatibility software.
> This hasn't been my experience with Windows in the last 5 years. Truth be told it's pretty stable by now and for me, issues like that are rare.
Good sleep on windows has only returned recently.
After years of great sleep on Windows 7, there have been massive changes following the introduction of ACPI S0.
Case in point: I got a nice laptop for classes like 4 years ago and it did NOT implement either S3 or S4 mode, which caused a MASSIVE problem in Linux. I found out about the issue on mailing list: the bios simply didn't implement at all this part of ACPI, instead of exposing the hooks based on the OS detection. It was to reduce problems in theory, but it brought many more in practice.
Connected standby (S0idle) was very flaky on Windows 10, and very often the laptop would eat the battery overnight instead of going to sleep.
I don't think a lot of Windows users notice when hardware has things like missing ACPI states because Windows since Vista tends to treat a lot of drivers as potentially "sleep hostile" and does all sorts of crazy tricks to paper over bad driver behavior, including sometimes hard shutting off/rebooting hardware on tough timeout limits (depending on hardware class) and fakes sleep/suspend as best as it can given whatever limits it comes across. The few times I've ever skimmed the ACPI/Power Events event logs in Windows, it's an amazing glimpse into some real wild goings on that rarely seem noticeable from a user level, but clearly indicate that drivers are as much of a mess as ever and Windows does a lot of work to make it look like things are fine, everything is fine, and system is peacefully sleeping (as hardware gets kicked under the table for acting up).
I'm not sure if there are direct lessons there for Linux driver handling as Microsoft has huge test labs that do forward these sorts of event logs to the hardware manufacturers and is in a position to expect at least some of them to do better next time (either next driver update or next hardware refresh).
This is how I feel about Linux on my laptop. Haven't had any sleep or dock issues in a long time. I think that PCs are much better overall about power management than they used to be. I think most of that has to do with the hardware vendors, and less to do with Windows or Linux.
Macs have always nailed it. When I worked at a computer store like 15 years ago, people would bring in their Macs, open up the lid and it would wake instantly after being asleep in someone's bag for 2 weeks and still have a 90% charge. Any Windows PC in that era would have run until it overheated and melted, or ran out of battery, whichever happened first.