Considering the security implications of suspend and how much enabling zram has improved my workflow for hibernate, I can't really say I miss suspend any much. It was fast (near-instant in good days) but it's always been a bet whether you can restore state or have to clean boot.

Also at least in my experience there were always a number of things that just borked suspend if you left them unattended. Back when I was still maining Debian Stable on 2022, having a remote mounted via SSHFS or having Redshift active always would lead to a near-eternal freeze before suspending, or worst case scenario a suspend-into-crash (ie.: suspends right, but panics during resume).

And it's crap across the OSes.

Never had these problems with MacBooks. It’s probably one advantage of the OS and hardware being made by the same company.

The problem is it's not stupid simple, it's actually fairly complicated. Each piece of hardware and its driver must be suspended. The GPU is a particularly tricky one. Its processor must be suspended, and the state saved. In the kernel, the driver must suspend its execution, and likewise save its state. Then on resume, each half has to reload and begin execution again. And if there's any mismatch in the resumed states, the GPU and/or driver crash and probably take the kernel with it.

Now do that for the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sound card, USB, disk controller, and every other device.

Hell, why is sleep so hard for most humans?

A few years ago Windows invented a new sleep state, s0ix, instead of the previous s3 state. This makes a laptop behave more like a phone, able to wake up when it receives new data.

Unfortunately this is usually implemented badly and also causing the removal or neglect of previously reliable s3 sleep.

Wait, are you suggesting it's consistent and reliable on desktops?

https://enaix.github.io/2025/06/03/acpi-conspiracy.html

First thing I do on any OS, but especially linux, is turn off every sleep-related option permanently. I don't care anymore. I won't fight with it.

I have an old Dell XPS 13 sleep works great on for Linux probably can sleep a week or two and still have charge left when I open the lid. I have a newer framework and it's dead in 2 days while "sleeping."

In my case its because Sony messed up the bios in more ways than one and refuses to correct the problems. They work around it with their own drivers witin Windows and leave it like that, but it also breaks Linux functionality as a result.

I researched this in (checking notes) 2009 or so… things may have slightly changed since (and my memory is fading away)

At the time there was a standard for sleeping. Microsoft was part of the standard… and then they decided to implement in a different way (classic Microsoft, of course).

Hardware producers then adjusted to windows because… well… we were dozens of us using Linux on laptops.

This created issues in Linux because there were some purist developers that wanted to follow the standards, others that were more pragmatic and wanted to implement the windows way. In the end nothing worked.

Fast forward to today, windows waking up constantly I guess it’s broken as expected because it wants to allow background processes to do stuff. Linux not waking up sounds still the issue from 2009: there are multiple levels of sleep and the deepest was the most problematic. If I have to guess your laptop wakes up just fine if the battery is full and you left closed for few minutes… while it doesn’t when the battery is low-ish and/or you left sleeping for a longer period

I haven't used sleep on any of my laptops for >20 years because it's been so unreliable. Rather than getting frustrated, I gave up pretending it would ever work, and adjusted accordingly.

weirdly i have the windows problem on linux with my laptop: never have I had it not wake from sleep, but sometimes it starts overheating while on sleep and drains the battery super quick

many times ive put my laptop on sleep in my pouch, taken it out and hear the fans blasting, the laptop is burning hot and the battery lost 40% in 20 minutes

Are you talking about sleep, hibernate, or monitor off?

I have had no issues with sleep on macOS, so whatever they are doing we should try to copy !

The same MacBook air, that used to last over a week with the lid closed on macOS, now needs to be charged every 3 days on Asahi NixOS.

Linux is a much better operating system, even just for the sheer variety of software available, but power management isn't quite there yet in my experience on this laptop.

Maybe that's more an issue with modern standby? Or the hardware has some quirks. The last two laptops I had were a Thinkpad and now a Dell Latitude. And they both sleep very well. I close the lid and they'll drain a few battery percent over the day, I open the lid, the display lights up and I can resume work... Rarely any issues with Linux.

wakes up when nobody asks for it.

Wrong. You might not have asked for it, but it is not your computer, it's Windows' computer. Microsoft decides when it wakes up.

It's amazing how bad Linux and Windows are at sleeping on my laptops. My steam deck has a power drain issue too, even when fully powered off.

It's been quite a while since I've used sleep on a laptop, but it worked well on my Dell (latitude I think, as I said, it's been a while). It did take a little experimenting with sleep levels to get it reliable, but once it was it worked for years.

ETA: I realise that saying "it worked for me" is probably intensely annoying, my appologies for that, but I thought a counterpoint might be a useful extra data point.

my guess is because the CPU power levels are fucking trashed because of all the patches they have to run at runtime. before Intel went all "wild west" with their security practices to improve performance, sleep worked just fine for me.

keep in mind, this was before uefi too, so it might also have a hand in the problems.

on Windows they keep waking up when nobody asks for it

Good to hear.

ACPI is weird and sometimes hardware dependent, so it's really hard to support it on every device. that's my current understanding at least.

Re the windows waking up, it's likely a network card/chip to blame. You can disable the ability to wake inside Device Manager. Every time I had a system wake unexpectedly, networking was to blame.

Never had I problems with sleep. Neither with arch, suse, fedora nor ubuntu. Neither with Gnome nor with kde.

Not even with windows.

Must be the hardware (brand).

Works fine on mine. Windows will wake up and check for updates if you don't turn that off. It doesn't work on Linux?

Its mostly the blue light and the lack of melatonin. Seriously though I have not had an issue with it in linux and not really that much with windows but half the time I shut my machine down.

With OpenSUSE Leap sleep always worked for me, (even hibernate works) but if you had it as external monitor only then sometimes the screen power off would not come back on, and the laptop screen was told to stay off. I found myself using KDEconnect on my phone to try to cycle monitor power on/off command and sometimes it figured it out

My laptop refuses to stay asleep if fstab disks were disconnected prior to sleeping. It works perfectly fine for me now that I figured that out.

Just one more weird behavior with fstab and kde or Linux or arch? I don't know who to blame.

On the Windows one, consider hibernating it. Its a longer wake up time, but it doesn't wake up randomly.

I bring you the classic by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie

Roughly 1M anecdotes in the comments already

Sleep on my minisfourm v3 is awesome with Linux. It correctly detects the keyboard cover, auto rotates based on the accelerometer and can be unlocked using the fingerprint sensor.

My laptop uses 0.07w sleeping, draining about 1.8% of the battery per hour. I would say that's acceptable with 32GB RAM s2idle

Framework 16 on NixOS