Linux

wakes up when nobody asks for it.

Wrong. You might not have asked for it, but it is not your computer, it's Windows' computer. Microsoft decides when it wakes up.

I have had no issues with sleep on macOS, so whatever they are doing we should try to copy !

The same MacBook air, that used to last over a week with the lid closed on macOS, now needs to be charged every 3 days on Asahi NixOS.

Linux is a much better operating system, even just for the sheer variety of software available, but power management isn't quite there yet in my experience on this laptop.

And it's crap across the OSes.

Never had these problems with MacBooks. It’s probably one advantage of the OS and hardware being made by the same company.

Hell, why is sleep so hard for most humans?

The problem is it's not stupid simple, it's actually fairly complicated. Each piece of hardware and its driver must be suspended. The GPU is a particularly tricky one. Its processor must be suspended, and the state saved. In the kernel, the driver must suspend its execution, and likewise save its state. Then on resume, each half has to reload and begin execution again. And if there's any mismatch in the resumed states, the GPU and/or driver crash and probably take the kernel with it.

Now do that for the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sound card, USB, disk controller, and every other device.

It's amazing how bad Linux and Windows are at sleeping on my laptops. My steam deck has a power drain issue too, even when fully powered off.

A few years ago Windows invented a new sleep state, s0ix, instead of the previous s3 state. This makes a laptop behave more like a phone, able to wake up when it receives new data.

Unfortunately this is usually implemented badly and also causing the removal or neglect of previously reliable s3 sleep.

This is purely anecdotally and pretty worthless as a guide or anything, but i got it working perfectly on my framework laptop running kde neon (basically Ubuntu with kde as de in rolling release mode) But its basically archeotech, past me followed a bunch of hints in the framework forum, did some unknown configuration and now it works reliable through all other updates since at least 20 month, battery holds around a week or so sleeping i think

my guess is because the CPU power levels are fucking trashed because of all the patches they have to run at runtime. before Intel went all "wild west" with their security practices to improve performance, sleep worked just fine for me.

keep in mind, this was before uefi too, so it might also have a hand in the problems.

https://enaix.github.io/2025/06/03/acpi-conspiracy.html

First thing I do on any OS, but especially linux, is turn off every sleep-related option permanently. I don't care anymore. I won't fight with it.

Never had I problems with sleep. Neither with arch, suse, fedora nor ubuntu. Neither with Gnome nor with kde.

Not even with windows.

Must be the hardware (brand).

I researched this in (checking notes) 2009 or so… things may have slightly changed since (and my memory is fading away)

At the time there was a standard for sleeping. Microsoft was part of the standard… and then they decided to implement in a different way (classic Microsoft, of course).

Hardware producers then adjusted to windows because… well… we were dozens of us using Linux on laptops.

This created issues in Linux because there were some purist developers that wanted to follow the standards, others that were more pragmatic and wanted to implement the windows way. In the end nothing worked.

Fast forward to today, windows waking up constantly I guess it’s broken as expected because it wants to allow background processes to do stuff. Linux not waking up sounds still the issue from 2009: there are multiple levels of sleep and the deepest was the most problematic. If I have to guess your laptop wakes up just fine if the battery is full and you left closed for few minutes… while it doesn’t when the battery is low-ish and/or you left sleeping for a longer period

Sleep function works pretty flawlessly on macOS. Always has. The hibernation function is pretty great, too.

Wait, are you suggesting it's consistent and reliable on desktops?

Maybe that's more an issue with modern standby? Or the hardware has some quirks. The last two laptops I had were a Thinkpad and now a Dell Latitude. And they both sleep very well. I close the lid and they'll drain a few battery percent over the day, I open the lid, the display lights up and I can resume work... Rarely any issues with Linux.

I haven't used sleep on any of my laptops for >20 years because it's been so unreliable. Rather than getting frustrated, I gave up pretending it would ever work, and adjusted accordingly.

I have an old Dell XPS 13 sleep works great on for Linux probably can sleep a week or two and still have charge left when I open the lid. I have a newer framework and it's dead in 2 days while "sleeping."

In my case its because Sony messed up the bios in more ways than one and refuses to correct the problems. They work around it with their own drivers witin Windows and leave it like that, but it also breaks Linux functionality as a result.