[sabujp]

This is amazing work! If folks have ever wondered why suspend is so difficult to get working on linux and why debugging it is equally difficult, this is a single datapoint with lots of information about all the things that can go wrong. Even now I have a thinkpad P1G4 where the fans won't turn off automatically unless I turn them off before going into suspend. Recently I also started having crackling issues with my bluetooth headphones after resuming from suspend and had to disable node suspension there also (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Noticeable_audio_d...).

[Apofis]

Remarkable that it's 2025 and laptop sleep/suspend still doesn't work right on linux. I think the first time I encountered this was probably 15 years ago now?

[xondono]

Sleep & suspend doesn’t work on Windows either.

Power control is the kind of stuff that benefits from very tight integration, and PCs just don’t have that.

Firmware is seen by most vendors as a pure cost to minimize, so you get a fragmented market full of subcontractors delivering the bare minimum that is considered “working”. Manufacturers also know most people aren’t going to use a big part of the functions they’re supposed to provide to OSes, and no one is really checking them, so it’s very common for devices to have only partial support for things they supposedly do.

[kiwijamo]

Even Apple struggled to get it working perfectly in my experience across several models in the PPC/x86 era. Yes they are better(-ish) but when I had Apple laptops I'd still see weird sleep/wake issues in around 1 in every ~50 sleep/wake cycles. I also had one Apple laptop which had its battery going from 100% to 0% overnight during sleep requiring a cold start in the morning on a regular basis despite it being put to sleep the evening before and seemingly going to sleep without issues. Lenovo manages to do sleep/wake fine in Linux almost as well as Apple in my experience and I sleep/wake my Lenovo laptop regularly -- this is across two different models I have used so far (X1 and X390). Hopefully Apple has improved this in their ARM laptops but haven't used them much so can't really comment on ARM.

[nyarlathotep_]

Even now on ARM it's not perfect. my M1 Mini will wake from sleep to a greenscreen and then crash/reboot ~once every few months, irrespective of uptime.

My work mac (M1 Pro) occasionally locks up and reboots when waking from sleep too, at about the same frequency.

Always wondered why this was such a difficult problem to solve, seemingly irrespective of operating system. (Linux has never been acceptable or reliable in this respect, IME, regardless of distro and hardware configuration.)

[turtlebits]

I've never had an issue with wake/sleep on any of my M1/2/4 devices. The only issue I can ever recall with sleep was the 2019 16" Intel (which had a host of issues).

[adolph]

> Lenovo manages to do sleep/wake fine in Linux almost as well as Apple in my experience and I sleep/wake my Lenovo laptop regularly -- this is across two different models I have used so far (X1 and X390).

I'd rate my OpenBSD X1 as not terrible too. Not as smooth as MacBook but adequate.

[lyu07282]

I always had the suspicion that this has more to do with a lot of kernel hackers using Thinkpads, so they fix them up, rather than Lenovo doing a good job.

[winrid]

Carbon or Extreme? I can't even get resume on windows to work properly on my 1st gen X1 Extremes

[adolph]

Carbon, gen6, chosen after reading Joshua Stein [0]. As I understand it, OpenBSD and NVIDIA aren't a lovely pairing.

0. https://jcs.org/2019/08/14/x1c7

[sroussey]

It’s much better on ARM. And their external monitor support is so much faster and reliable now. Having control over all their hardware has made a noticeable improvement.

[tiagod]

This is not my experience. My M1 Pro MacBook has very strange issues with sound over HDMI. I usually need to reboot it when I connect it to my TV or media won't play if the sound is output over HDMI.

[Shadowmist]

Every time I turn on my M1 Max Mac I have to unplug and replug the HDMI but other than that the machine is a dream to use.

[smallpipe]

Same here on an M1. If you find a solution…

[bzzzt]

That's annoying but could also be caused by the monitor or TV HDMI implementation.

[stephen_g]

I was amazed when I got an 11th-generation Intel NUC and it didn't sleep/wake properly.

I would have expected it with a cheap clone, but this was a fully integrated computer made by the same people who designed and manufactured the processor itself!

I can't remember if it ever fixed it - maybe after a year or two there were finally newer EFI and graphics drivers that fixed the issue, but maybe it never did? In the end I ended up getting a newer machine to replace it anyway and it became my home server so just runs Proxmox now and doesn't need to ever sleep...

[emmelaich]

I know the NUC I had had it's ethernet port put PERMANENTLY to sleep.

There was, eventually, a Windows program which hacked the device to take it out of sleep. But I had no Windows OS on it. Before I got around to installing enough Windows, the NUC died for other reasons :-(

[mindcrime]

> Sleep & suspend doesn’t work on Windows either.

Or Macintosh. My $DAYJOB Macbook sleeps properly about about 2 out of 10 times, at best. Most of the time it fails to sleep and by the next morning when I open it up, the battery is dead. :-(

For comparison, my System76 laptop running PopOS! sleeps perfectly, every time with no issues. shrug

[vlovich123]

> My $DAYJOB Macbook sleeps properly about about 2 out of 10 times, at best. Most of the time it fails to sleep and by the next morning when I open it up, the battery is dead. :-(

Important to remember that work laptops typically install all sorts of crap spyware and fleet management software that causes the system to misbehave. That’s not as much on Apple although not protecting their brand against such software is on them.

[mindcrime]

Good point. And this machine does have the typical stack of enterprise spyware crapola. Curiously enough though, sleep / suspend do work occasionally. Just not consistently.

[stock_toaster]

> Or Macintosh. My $DAYJOB Powerbook...

You use a 20+ year old[1] PowerPC laptop for your dayjob?

Talk about hardware longevity!

[1]: Powerbooks were last made in 2006 I think?

[mindcrime]

Typo/brainfart/whatever. I meant to say Macbook. It's about 2 years old.

[bachmeier]

> Sleep & suspend doesn’t work on Windows either.

What's strange is that it never used to be a problem. There are five Windows laptops floating around our house at various times (mixture of work and personal) and suspend works properly on none of them. Oddly, it works on my personal laptop with Debian Stable almost every time, failing maybe 1/25 times. Other distros are about the same as Windows.

[_cenw]

Modern Standby. Windows wanted to do the Apple "power nap" stuff, but never realized how painful it'd be if you don't control all the hardware and have millions of different hardware permutations (with a lot of terrible drivers) instead of just a few. Not that it would've helped, half the time my machine is either overheating or off it seems to be wake timers doing windows updates (which yes, you can disable, but most wouldn't).

I don't get why S3 sleep had to die for this, but it did.

[lillecarl]

I'm super happy with S0 on Linux. The implementation is all about doing as little as possible but effectively remain "on".

[vladvasiliu]

What's the point, though? If it doesn't actually do anything, why keep it on?

[jorvi]

> Windows wanted to do the Apple "power nap" stuff

On Linux, you can run a systemd unit file that will trigger `rfkill` on sleep and a different `rfkill` invocation on wake and you effectively dodge all that crap because the laptop isn't connected to WiFi and thus will sit around realizing its spinning its wheels and wil shut down further down the s0 chain.

> I don't get why S3 sleep had to die for this, but it did.

Worse yet, the dirty little secret is that many laptops that offer both S0 and S3 will actually drain more energy in S3 than in S0 because the S3 mode has had poor QA.

[OvbiousError]

My colleague showed me his windows machine recently. The rubber on the back around the fans has melted from the times he forgot to shut it down and sleep didn't trigger when he packed it away in his backpack.

[dhon_]

Linus tech tips on YouTube did a video about a windows bug where sleeping while charging would allow the laptop to wake up to check for updates etc but often caused this issue of turning on in a bag

[whizzter]

It wouldn't happen that this feature was released around early/mid 2020? Windows sleep used to be semi-reliable but one it's been shit for a couple of years.

(Any link to the video/docs for turning it off?)

[jml78]

Are there issues in Windows? Sure but if you give me 100 laptops, 80% will do this right without any issue. Maybe 30% of those laptops will work right on any Linux distro without major fucking around with bullshit trying to make it work. Yes those numbers are made up but I have been running versions of Linux since Slackware in the 90s. I still have a desktop with an amd cpu and nvidia gpu that I can’t get to sleep/suspend right. Works fine when dual boated in windows. I just gave up and manually do shit now when using Linux

[dharmab]

Oh no, Windows Modern Standby is infamously terrible and unreliable. Here is a youtube video with millions of views explaining the problems in detail: https://youtu.be/OHKKcd3sx2c

[iamtedd]

Two years ago, that video was published.

Good thing it's all fixed now, eh! /s

[weberer]

0% of new Windows laptops support proper S3 sleep mode since Microsoft gutted it in favor of "modern standby".

[dharmab]

Framework does! I think they might be the _only_ one to consistently support it.

[lenkite]

Once upon a time, Windows sleep was reliable 99.xy% of the time. If you put a Windows laptop to sleep it stayed asleep cozily.

Now its like an elderly nursing home patient who wakes up several times and raids the kitchen to eat all the time.

The fall of a once great OS is sad to see. I guess AI matters more to Microsoft than their Core OS nowadays.

[washadjeffmad]

This space is problematic enough that you could reliably segfault 2017-2019 Intel MacBooks by closing the lid before unplugging HID peripherals, preventing suspend (and cooking it in your bag on the commute home).

It also plagues Windows on custom PC builds, even when there are vendor drivers. Not every component plays nicely with suspend states, ASPM, C-sates, load line calibration, etc. And while often the capability exists natively to address issues (in BIOS, Linux, etc), how many people know how to start looking?

[janderson215]

Hmm I thought that was a feature, not a bug. I used to leave everything plugged and close the lid if I wanted big downloads to keep going or wanted an even quicker start up.

[c-hendricks]

The computer staying awake when there's a monitor / keyboard/ other HID connected is one thing

The computer locking up when said devices are removed and not properly going to sleep then is a different (much worse) issue

[burnte]

My custom-build desktop had an issue with the previous AM4 motherboard I had where if you told Windows to hibernate, the entire machine would shut down as normal, but then a few seconds later it'd wake back up by itself and unhibernate. I had to turn off the PSU power switch during those few moments to keep it in hibernate mode. New mobo and that's gone now. BIOS updates never helped. Really odd.

[iamtedd]

Probably no help to you now, but if someone has a Windows machine that keeps waking up by itself, you can see what triggered the wake by running

    powercfg /lastwake

in a command window as admin.

[burnte]

True, and that helps if it won't go to sleep. This was some weird bug in either the board or the bios.

[rikthevik]

After my (closed) gaming laptop started making annoying Windows noises earlier today, I'm led to believe that it doesn't work properly on Windows either.

It seems like it's basically hardware whack-a-mole at this point. The only reason Apple does it reasonably well is they control more of the stack and they support less hardware. The only reason Windows does it better than Linux is they have more eyes on it.

[sour-taste]

The reason it works better on Mac and windows is because they're designed to be desktop OSs. On Linux the funding goes to things cloud services and Android use, which decidedly does not include suspension or other desktop features

[heavyset_go]

The article we're replying under has the author working with Mario Limonciello, an AMD employee and kernel developer.

I've interacted with him countless times on the kernel mailing list and bug tracker, he's literally paid by AMD to work on Linux support for AMD's consumer desktop hardware.

[bongodongobob]

It doesn't work right on Windows either to be fair. With a mixed laptop fleet at work, we've just disabled sleep/hibernate company wide because it causes way too many problems.

[larrik]

That seems like a good way to cook your laptop when you throw it into a bag with the CPU pegged.

[bongodongobob]

Not if you turn it off first.

[Joker_vD]

For some reason, people really insist on being able to put their machines to sleep, I honestly don't know why. Long boot times, maybe?

[bongodongobob]

I mean I totally get it. At the end of the day I have a billion tabs open and 14 instances of notepad. But after getting burned by sleep failing enough times, you gotta change your habits.

[lillecarl]

If you have a modern machine with S0 sleep, which is "modern standby" it's very much solved. What it does is it pauses all userspace processes, disables all cores but one and keeps it running on the lowest frequency. The system stays "on" but all devices go in power-saving state which is good enough for days.

So it's not really a problem unless you really wanna do deeper sleeps.

[grayhatter]

> so it's not really a problem unless you really wanna do deeper sleeps.

the way I parsed this was; so it's not really a problem unless you want to use your computer the way you want to use it.

I get things are complicated, and hardware support is a mixed bag. But it doesn't have to be this way.

[lillecarl]

My honest experience is that S0 is a godsend, when you use a device on a weekly basis S0 is good enough and it just works, no messing and fiddling and tweaking, just running.

Chasing "real sleep" gives me nothing but pain. Also Android devices "sleep" fully awake so it's really "what people are doing".

[makeitdouble]

Another way to put it: nobody solved this problem, so the next move was to embrace never sleeping and market it as a feature.

Microsoft also went that route with the Surface line, it just never sleeps.

[dismalaf]

Recent Windows laptops have even more issues. My wife literally never suspends her Windows laptop for this reason. Meanwhile my Intel/Nvidia laptop running Debian works flawlessly (albeit with Nouveau drivers, gave up on the proprietary ones for reasons unrelated to suspend).

[caycep]

it's arguably not great on windows either... (see Gigabyte Aorus comment above)

[trelane]

This is highly hardware dependent. Modern hardware is complex enough that it pretty much has to explicitly support Linux or it won't work well.

I have been buying System76 for about twenty years now, and this is has not been an issue for me either.

[xtracto]

Even hibernate has problems. The power features are some of the things I wish worked better in Linux in general :(

[ycui1986]

they don’t work on Windows either. Multiple of my laptops crash when wake up 30% of the times.

[jamesdutc]

It can be really hit-or-miss, and it can be really hard to debug errors like in the post.

A lot of workarounds that are suggested for various issues are also not really viable. Some of the workarounds involve turning off different power-saving modes; however, the point of enabling sleep is often to increase the amount of usable time between charges, and turning off these power-saving modes can often dramatically shorten battery life.

But getting sleep to work (even S0ix!) is not impossible.

I have a bunch of handheld AMD 7840U and AMD 8840U devices that I have installed Arch Linux on: GPD Win Max 2, GPD Win Mini, GPD Win 4, Minisforum V3, OneXPlayer X1 Ryzen. These devices were not designed with Linux support in mind. I would be very surprised if the companies that made them ever tested them with Linux. Yet with just a small amount of work (generally fiddling with `/proc/acpi/wakeup` and `/sys/devices/*/*/*/power/wakeup` to disable sources of spurious wakeups,) I have gotten essentially flawless S0ix support (… on all but the newest OneXPlayer X1 Ryzen.)

(In general, out-of-the-box stock Linux kernel support on these devices is fantastic. Touchscreens work, pen input works, wifi and Bluetooth work well. The only gap I've seen is fingerprint reader support.)

I suspect that given how small these manufacturers are (and how small their production batches must be,) there's much less extreme-customization and tight-integration of components. This is visibly evident in the form-factors of these devices, which many millimeters thicker than they might otherwise be. (Of course, these devices are primarily advertised to a gaming audience who are eager to avoid the thermal-throttling that happens with ultra-thin devices like Surface Pro…) I partially suspect that the lack of extreme-customization, the lack of tight-integration, and the smaller production batches means that the manufacturers make much more conservative choices in components. Maybe this explains the exceptional Linux support?

[hasperdi]

Hi, do you have these tweaks published somewhere? I'm particularly interested in knowing your GPD Win Mini tweaks.

Thanks

[fulafel]

To add: for the end user, the way to easily get working suspend is to buy known-good compatible hardware.

It's been solid on every business Thinkpad for a long long time for me and consistently seems people on Windows with the same models have more sleep problems.