This is my most needed feature in linux. I want zero ‘connect/disconnect’ sounds and if the laptop is asleep I don’t want it to wake up in the middle of the night for no reason.
I have an infinite supply of Windows laptops from work but I hate them with a burning passion and I can’t afford to replace my Macbook.
If someone can tell me what linux distro is the most silent and least annoying I will erase my entire Windows partition this weekend.
What Windows have been doing the last couple years is they moved from regular sleep to some poorly implemented standby mode that works more like a phone does where it still runs just very power efficiently and still does stuff in the background. Macs have been doing that for a long time except they actually did it right so it doesn’t suck.
Linux doesn’t support it yet so you’ll get classic stop the world sleep anyway, but either way it’ll always be customizable even when connected sleep gets implemented.
I know I’m showing my age with this comment, but when I don’t use my computer, I turn it off.
Difference with laptops and desktops.
Work laptops I almost never turn off. Hibernation is better because being able to save 10 minutes getting everything set back up is valuable.
Desktop gets turned off when I plan to not use it for a while.
Server is always on except for updates.
Under Windows, I never wanted to shut it down because it took forever to both shut down and boot back up, so I used the sleep function. But I’m definitely old enough to have grown up with the habit of turning off the computer when I’m done.
That same laptop running Linux gets shut down when I’m done using it for the night because it’s just so much faster, and it applies the automatic updates my distro uses - painlessly. Why are Windows updates so terrible?
The applying updates on shutdown is another interesting thing… Where did that come from btw? In the old days, my Linux machine used to apply updates in the background. Or ask me. And now a few distros have switched to doing it on shutdown (or worse: restart and start some systemd task and shut down again), which is mildly annoying if you want to shut down your laptop, throw it into the backpack and catch the next train.
Which distros are auto-updating at shutdown? I want to avoid that windows-ass bullshit like the plague. Never seen that on Linux so far.
Idk, I’m not distro-hopping that much these days. The Laptop that annoyed me had Debian Testing. I think with the unattended-upgrades (badly) configured. Fortunately you can change that in less than a minute…
It’s doing the updates automatically in the background, but it applies them on the next reboot. It’s easy to change that and manually update but I like how unintrusive it’s been - I’ve had to go and check to make sure my machine is actually updating. And if for whatever reason the update breaks something I can roll it back and still have a working computer and deal with tinkering later, but it hasn’t broken yet. I’m on Bazzite. It’s opinionated and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but I really like it.
Interesting. I really like the discrete nature of applying updates at will on pop os. I always despised windows doing it automatically
I despised Windows doing it automatically too, but that mostly had to do with how long it took, when it did it, and what those updates were. I think if Windows did updates like Bazzite, in the background while the computer isn’t under heavy load, rather than taking five + minutes at shutdown when you just want to go to bed, and you never boot back up to find out that the update was nearly unremovable AI garbage or ads, it’s better.
For the casual users who just want their computer to work, I think it’s a good way of doing it if you can’t do live patching for whatever reason, but for the OS as a hobby folks (I get it, no shade, lol) that you sometimes see in Linux spaces online, manual updates can be part of the fun.
Windows 95 had sleep mode and hibernation. Sleep mode, then as today, writes the system state to RAM, then shuts down power to everything but the RAM. Hibernation works in a similar way, except the system state is written to disk, then the computer is powered completely off. There’s no “do stuff in the background” mode.
Yes there is, “Modern Standby”/S0ix/S2idle.
The CPU is still in a sleep state but less deep than regular S3 suspend, and it can wake up much frequently and silently to do stuff like check emails or whatever.
See “Suspend to idle” : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate