In this article, I aim to take a different approach. We will begin by defining a laptop according to my understanding. The I will share my personal history and journey to this point, as well as my current situation with my home and work laptops. Using this perspective, we will explore the current dysfunctionality of the standby function in modern laptops, followed by a discussion of why this feature still has relevance and right to exist. Finally, we will draw conclusions on what we can learn and take away from this.
Edit! I’m wrong! Read below comment
A hibernation state where your laptop completely powers off saving current ram to disk to resume from when the system is powered back on. The article is a pretty interesting read!
S3 is what people actually think of when they think of sleep mode, or modern standby. The running state of the operating system is stored in RAM, in low power mode. All context for the cpu, other hardware like disks and network is lost and those devices are completely shut down - bar the RAM. Basically, you close the lid at the end of the day, and you’re nearly at the same charge level the next morning.
This saves a lot of power. On my older 8th gen intel cpu laptop, it loses maybe 1-2% charge per day in this mode.
My new 13th gen laptop still has deep sleep, or standby (s3) as a hardware function, but it’s technically not supported. It actually doesn’t work when enabled, and just falls back to s1 (sleep, everything’s still on, just in low power mode). It loses about 2-3% per hour in this mode
S4 (Hibernate) does roughly the same as S3, but the OS state is stored to the disk instead of ram, so that can be shut off too. Now the device is completely powered off, losing no charge while ‘asleep’.
S5 is off
S4 sleep takes much longer to wake up from than s3, so was less desirable. In the modern computing world (especially end user devices), commonly there’s full disk encryption going on, which adds a layer of complexity to resuming from disk, as you would when waking up from hibernation (s4).
Making it resume without putting in a decryption password for example (using a TPM), isn’t simple, and breaks a lot when you do system upgades
Is that what the Steam Deck uses? It’s pretty useful.
I wonder. The Steam Deck holds charge very well, but then another comment here says “Nothing with with a recent AMD gfx Card or APU will officially support S3”. Perhaps the Steam Deck uses hibernate? It launches pretty fast, but then maybe storing memory to the built-in SSD is fast enough. Or perhaps even if not officially supported the S3 in the Steam Deck’s APU still works well enough. Or perhaps the APU is older than I think it is.
In windows 10 you can reenable it, but you have dig a bit in the power management control panel to do so.
Its unfortunate that this thinking has bled over to Linux.