I already know the replies I might get but just wanted to get this out there. My laptop is now on 24x7 because I don't know if it will suspend or completely freeze.
Linux has reliable sleep on many more laptop models than mac os. But the rule is that you need to buy known good hardware that supports Linux to have a frictionless experience. (Yes this means you often have to buy something that's been on the market for a bit of time already.) Anecdotally I've had less sleep problems than mac-using coworkers, over a long time and many laptops.
I was thinking of somehow getting my hands on the FrameWork laptop since everyone and their mother keep singing praises about it but going through its forums makes it clear that it also doesn't do suspend and resume reliably.
I've already seen plenty of people reporting that their AMD laptops don't do suspend resume and break with every new kernel release. I assumed Intel would be better but reading about the same issue on FrameWork forums isn't encouraging at all.
Any hardware that ships with Linux, for a start. For another, anything whose quirks are documented on a popular community site (e.g., the Arch Linux Wiki).
It's important to choose a distro release a little bit newer than the hardware.
The Framework is brand new and doesn't ship with Linux, so I wouldn't expect it to be a trouble-free experience.
One way to know is reports on the web like you are already reading. Business ThinkPads with integrated GPUs tend to have many good models, for one concrete direction if you haven't found a starting point yet. Asking your sales rep, certifications, trying a live USB stick of your preferred distro at a friend/coworker/shop/it-dept owned machine can work too.
In my experience, "known good hardware" is ">2-year-old hardware" when it comes to Linux.
But, I'm a bit cheap, and I treat optimizing older tech as a challenge, so I think I've just declared myself both an outlier in general and a stereotypical Linux user.
My AMD Thinkpad was released a little over 2 years ago and it still has serious flaws. And if the AMD gitlab bug tracker and bug reports on forums are anything to go by, I'm not optimistic about those flaws going away in the future.
I have no idea if the situation is just as bad on Intel.
I never understood why I should be hibernating instead of suspending so I can't talk about that - but I haven't seen a laptop unable to suspend for years.
That could be luck and not buying laptops with terrible linux support but I wouldn't paint the situation as this tragic.
The experience out of the box is still crap because the ACPI signals from the hardware are often a complete mess - but disabling most of them generally works.
> and not buying laptops with terrible linux support but I wouldn't paint the situation as this tragic.
Please tell me the name of a laptop which has excellent support for Linux. At this point, I'm ready to go out of my way to spend more money than I can afford if that gets me excellent Linux compatibility.
I know, for a fact, that AMD based ThinkPads don't qualify. The Intel based FrameWork laptop has issues with suspend resume as well.
I obviously won't buy a 5 year old laptop. I guess I should change my question to "Are there any laptops released within the past year that have excellent Linux compatibility?" Because from what I've read on forums, suspend resume doesn't work for a lot of people and the scenario keeps changing from one Linux version to the other.
I can't confirm my experience is excellent but my partner's 2021 Acer Spin Pro 5 is on par with various Lenovo laptops (I was surprised when it mostly just worked) and better than Asus mobo desktops that I have used.
This has been my experience as well, with a fairly wide variety of nixes/bsds/etc and a half a dozen different machines.
Now I just disable it completely and tell it to shut down when I close the lid, and wait like 15s. If the fans and lights don't stop "soon", I know it's having problems turning off. It's much better than the random freezes, or boiling alive in a backpack before draining all battery power.
AMD https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-S2id...
s2idle is broken and I have an AMD thinkpad with deep sleep and even that doesn't suspend 80% of the time.
Intel (search for 'deep' and 's2idle') https://community.frame.work/t/ubuntu-21-04-on-the-framework...
I already know the replies I might get but just wanted to get this out there. My laptop is now on 24x7 because I don't know if it will suspend or completely freeze.