Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nasso_ 996 days ago
> Among other things, this means that modern forms of suspend work out of the box

That sounds very promising. That has always been a major annoyance to me. I don't think i have every owned a laptop with linux where I actually trusted that it would still have battery the day after if I just closed the lid.

2 comments

I may have misunderstood, but I did not read this as saying "S3 suspend works". I read it as "'Modern suspend' works, so I don't have to keep trying to get S3 suspend working".

That is basically the opposite of what you want. 'Modern suspend' is why you burn battery with the lid closed, overheat your laptop when it's closed in a backpack, etc. It sucks. It's not sleeping in any real sense and can power up to full power if a fly farts too close to the microphone.

For better or worse (worse IMO), I think that what we knew as "suspend to RAM" or S3 is gone forever. It was apparently just too hard to get working reliably with all the peripheral hardware and they gave up.

Everything I have read says that for any recent laptop, if you want reliable suspending that won't burn battery you have to always "hibernate" or "suspend to disk". It takes longer to start back up but initializes all the peripherals from "off" so it can be more reliable.

I'm still working with my older HP laptop that has legit S3 and am dreading an upgrade to a "modern" one.

I have the same experience with various Lenovo laptops running Windows. However, whatever Apple does on MacBooks works. I can close the lid, slide it into my backpack on Friday and open it on Monday with virtually the same battery level.
You can set it to "non-Windows" (aka real) standby in the BIOS settings. If you can't find it in settings, this might help: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lenovo/comments/zq3tc5/how_to_disab...
It's a tough spot since you need S0ix (modern suspend) for Windows 11 to work but you need S3 for Intel ME to be turned off so you would have to pick one or the other.
"Modern suspend" is a specific technical term for the suspend system from Intel and MS that's supposed to supersede S3 suspend. It's supposed to let the OS do stuff like poll emails and download software updates while in the suspend state. Modern suspend typically has the problem you describe with both Windows and Linux since its teething problems have continued for a long time.