Wait, did Microsoft kill sleep?
The reliability of sleep/wake was the original killer app for me on a Mac laptop. I used to carry my Dell around from meeting to meeting flat with the lid half-open, just so that I could get started right away when I sat down.
I borrowed a Macbook and being able to snap the lid shut, carry it normally, then open it and just start typing was so freeing. It sounds like a small thing, but a small thing repeated many times throughout many days adds up.
My wife has a work-issued Dell and it is amazing how loud the fans get while it is sitting, unattended, with the lid closed. We notice it not infrequently… why did the TV get quieter? Oh, actually the background noise got louder.
It’s amazing that “sleep” is still an issue for Microsoft Windows computers today.
I recently got a cheap ThinkPad to install Linux on, but it comes stock with Windows 10. As a long time Mac user, this is my first time using Windows since about 2009. It was quite shocking to see what a mess they've made. On one hand, some aspects are fairly intuitive - the start menu command launcher is nice, for example. But the amount of adware bundled in the operating system is incredible. There are ads in my OS user interface!
If you're a Windows user who is fed up with Windows or hesitant to upgrade to Windows 11, I would encourage you to give macOS a try. Even if it's a hackintosh, the experience will be way better than you're used to on Windows.
Seems to be another case of Microsoft's broken "Modern Standby".
Linus Tech Tips video about it from a few months ago:
Have seen more than one report of a modern Dell Windows 10/11 Laptop that melted itself while shut and supposedly "sleeping" in a backpack because it randomly decided to fully wake up and run some CPU intensive process.
I'm not even using Windows, but MS has ruined it for us all. S0 works reasonably well on my ThinkPad X13 G2 with Ubuntu, meaning it goes to "sleep" and wakes up without problems and last a couple days to a week. But is this what I want? I don't need some always-connected bs, thank you! I can wait 5 seconds for my laptop to wakeup and then check for new mail. Seriously, MS, do something.
Edit: Or is Intel to blame here? I don't know.
Edit2: Or maybe Lenovo or all 3? Didn't this work in the past pretty flawlessly
Last edit: ok, ranting about this actually made me look for solutions again (I did when I first got the notebook. Couldn't find anything). As it turns out you supposedly can (Cannot test rn) switch to Linux Sleep (s3) in the BIOS. If this turns out to be true, I take everything back.
As I understand it, it's also the CPU manufacturers, motherboard suppliers, and system integrators. Intel and AMD are not consistently supporting S3, and some motherboards (iirc) toggle it off even when the chip purports to support it. System integrators may also leave the BIOS setting for S3 off even when supported.
As for why? As many know from the history of Linux support for sleep, it's not always been great. Every device in the system has to support it, and there's a risk of corrupting state when execution resumes. It's much easier to keep the system running in a lower power mode. That's true of all of the device drivers and firmware on the system too.
It's frankly shoddy work though that it works so poorly that the order in which one unplugs their laptop and closes the screen affects whether it correctly enters S0ix. I can't believe issues like that have made it out of QA on laptops over and over again, resulting in laptops overheating and reaching 0% charge. The Linus Tech Tips video here goes into the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c
I gave up trying to fix sleep for now. The problem I was getting was a complete loss of the running session (including unsaved work) when coming back from sleep. I applied some configuration changes that seem to correctly put Windows into hibernation mode instead of sleep, and although there are some things which aren't as reliable in hibernation as they are in sleep, it's better than just losing everything unexpectedly. With SSDs I don't really mind the increased delay when resuming if it means I don't lose anything.
Spoiler: Microsoft killed sleep.