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.

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.

moth doesn't know what CPU you use, but newer AMD chips don't support S3. AMD removed that because they think modern suspend is better, an opinion that doesn't seem to be shared by the consumers.

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.

No rest for the wicked?

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_sleep returns "[s2idle] deep" then you can add mem_sleep_default=deep to 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.

I've only used windows at work in the past 10 years or so but my windows experience with sleep was far far worse.

My laptop would always wake up in my bag on my hour+ commute. The laptop would be scorching hot and the battery dead by the time I got to the office. Every time.

Never experienced that in Linux.

Recently I switched to a Linux computer at work and it's much better in every regard.

My personal desktop (runs arch (btw)), did have some trouble with sleep recently tho...I replaced my 5700G with a 5600X3D and it would refuse to wake from sleep, necessitating a hard shutdown (by PSU switch!)...but I think that was a bios bug. My bios was already very close to latest but I think upgrading that was what ultimately fixed it. Now it works fine.

Debian has worked fine on my old laptop, probably only a few days for me but the battery is a decade old or so.

Too much screentime before bed?

If only going to sleep was simple. There's a bunch of different sleep states. S3 is ram and S4 is hibernate.

Check your supported sleep states. At the command line type cat /sys/power/state

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.4/admin-guide/pm/sleep-states.html

Your system goes to sleep and wakes up? My system goes to sleep and then crashes. We are not the same

Windows doesn't sleep. Ever. Sleep is now just a nickname for Modern Standby, which is just running in low power mode doing a whole bunch of shit. The amount of times I come back to my laptop and it has gotten stuck at a reboot is just embarrassing. I dual-boot and have Grub, so whenever Windows tries to reboot itself it gets stuck.

People have gotten their laptops damaged because they thought they were sleeping and put them in a bag, when Windows decides to try to update itself while the fans are blocked inside the bad. Bam, heat damage.

When Windows or Mac are put to sleep, the damn things can sleep for a week!

When I put my Windows work laptop to sleep, it damn well can sleep for a week. In fact, it sleeps so well that you could fell a tree next to it and it still wouldn't wake up.

They should really rename that button to "coma". "Sleep" implies you can wake it up.

It's mostly a mix of newer laptops not supporting suspend to RAM (only suspend to idle), and faulty hardware requiring proprietary hacks to actually go idle.