Technology

This is one area where Apple has it pretty right. A Mac will do somethings when ‘asleep’ like download emails and texts. It also can broadcast its location if the ‘Find Me’ function is on. If it’s plugged into power then backups will also run, and background app updates will happen. It does this in a low power mode, so it won’t get hot enough to need fans. It’s worked flawlessly for 20 years. Meanwhile all our PCs are set to ‘never sleep’ and just get shutdown when not in use. I never trust a PC laptop to wake successfully from sleep just by closing the lid.

People are using their smartphones instead of their PCs. That hurts sales. So PCs need to behave more like smartphones, e.g. by being able to notify you of new messages at all times. Then people will surely ditch their smartphones again and buy laptops.

Intel, Microsoft et al never considered that that's fundamentally not how PCs should work.

My desktop is the same way, “sleep” means the lights are on but nobody’s home.

I was kinda shocked to switch from an i5-6300U to a i5-1145G7 and not find more options in /sys/power/mem_sleep, but literally only s2idle. At least it works (i believe).

Maybe actual hibernation works now, too.

My Linux laptop doesn't have this problem as well except for when I have an external drive plugged via USB which was almost always for backups: then it makes the screen go black and turns the fans on 100% and stays that way. Forever. If I'm fast enough there's a small window of time where I can mash random buttons to make it wake up again. Luckily this doesn't seem to happen with external SSDs plugged in via USB so it's all good 🤷‍♀️

No, if your motherboard/BIOS/ACPI/CPU does not support S3, linux will not magically implement it. This has nothing to do with Windows.

My Linux laptop goes to sleep, but not without errors. Every time I close open that lid it's a bunch of terminal errors about devices, notably bluetooth. Cool. Thumbs up

So if I have my laptop in bed at night and then close the laptop lid to go to sleep and wake up, the reason the battery is fucking dead is because the laptop never actually "sleeps" - it just enters a lower power state while still draining battery relatively aggressively?

Maybe, but Microsoft's competitors are doing a lot better on the battery life front so they're leaving a lot on the table for competitors to swoop in by not fixing their sleep and wake issues. It was a big consideration for the company I work at to go with Apple machines because they do lots of field work and need the machines running all day. I can say from experience it's incredibly frustrating to leave home with my MS Surface on a full charge only for it to have majority of the battery drained by the time I pull it out of my backpack due to waking up when it wasn't supposed to.

I swear Microsoft is intentionally trying to drive me away to Linux. Tried everything you can imagine to stop my pc from waking up when I put to sleep or hibernation. Yet the best I can get is it always waking up first time and then properly sleeping after the second attempt. I'm only stopped because of VR and dumb Anti cheat in a few games.

The point is that Microsoft can run malware whenever and however they like. It is not useful for the user.

Ain't nothin' but a heartache

Mostly incorrect, entering the BIOS and having the toggle to switch between S0 and S3 (or, "Linux") sleep does indeed exist but it is hard to identify what models have it (I hear Lenovo's BIOS simulator helps) and it's increasingly being removed in newer models or even removed in updates. Dell has no interest in putting it back and recommends hibernate or just powering off the machine when on-the-go.

I made sure the ThinkPad I own personally had the toggle but my work-issued one does not so it is now a Hibernate-only machine. No setting can help that.

Apparently not in Windows settings:

If the BIOS says it supports Modern Standby, Windows takes it at its word and completely disables the ability to enter S3 sleep (classic standby). There’s no official or documented option for disabling Modern Standby through Windows, which is incredibly annoying.

Side note: for a while, there was actually a registry setting you could change to disable Modern Standby on the Windows side. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed it, and to my knowledge, has never added it back.

I'm not a Windows user, so I can't confirm one way or the other, but toward the end of the end of the article the author gives vendor-specific instructions for disabling the S0 Low Power Idle capability from BIOS.