I've been on the "modern standby" hate train for as long as it's existed. Not because it's such a terrible idea per se. You can debate that if you like. I hate it because it fundamentally changes the behavior behind an existing API (lid close, suspend button, or ACPI S3 trigger, take your pick) without warning, and in most cases, without the ability to get the old behavior back.
Regardless of a valid use case for "modern standby", there is DEFINITELY a use case for "old suspend to RAM" and "old hybrid suspend to RAM", which have de facto been blown away by the change.
I have no problem with adding a new sleep state that makes sense for other users. Go ahead and add S22 for that exotic sleep state manufacturing robots use between shifts. S344 for bluetooth devices waiting for reconnection. Whatever, I don't care. But don't replace an existing PRIMARY UI PATTERN with them.
To be fair this is not on microsoft for inventing S0, or even pushing for it for windows devices. It's on device manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo for dropping S3 from UEFI in favor of it.
I learned about this workaround a while back on some throwaway comment on a youtube video, and from what I can tell it really works. I never bothered to really look into system logs or whatever to verify what was going on.
But in a nutshell, unplug your laptop before you close the lid. Windows does not suspend to modern standby when that happens. I always had an overcooked and dead laptop at the other end of my commute, which went away when I started unplugging first. Now my windows machine can go literal days in sleep mode without really impacting remaining battery that much.
which points to a absurdity of s0, it seems to consistently miss or have bugs in things I would expect to be core aspects like
- monitoring if power is unpluged
- monitoring if battery level sings below threshold
- monitor CPU temperature
and take appropriate actions, like transitioning to "classical" S3 or better hybrid S3
it's totally a misterious for me how that doesn't work well even 10 years later
I mean bugs which idk. unexpectedly drain a bit more battery etc. are to be expected but I would expect the UEFI to be like "uh that's too much CPU heat lets stop here", "uh that's draining the batter too fast let's stop", "uh only 40% batter better not even try anything". And sure you want hello to work even with <40% battery but that's if its enabled, which often it isn't.
This does work, however it’s really not ideal for Windows machines using a dock (which is usually the power connection) and external monitors. If you unplug first, all your windows get moved to the single laptop display, but if you close the lid first, everything is where it was when you resume.
> It's on device manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo for dropping S3 from UEFI in favor of it.
Note that even CPU manufacturers no longer provide firmware development support for making S3 work on recent series of CPUs. (Apparently some get an exception, as I’ve heard of some laptops from large brands that are sold with Linux and do have S3 support in the firmware.)
Device manufacturers just want windows to run. And why wouldn't they? They sell the devices with windows. If windows doesn't use S3 then S3 never gets tested, whether it's present or not. So it doesn't work, whether it's present or not, and you can't use it, whether it's present or not.
What's the market share of windows on laptops these days, 20% perhaps? I don't know, but I know that Chromebooks and Macos are ahead, far ahead.
Once upon a time, there were fifty times as many Windows laptops as Linux (by which I mean debian, mint, etc) and Linux was ignorable. Now the factor is closer to ten, and I find it difficult to believe that device manufacturers simply ignore that. If they don't support S3, there likely is a better reason than the dominance of Windows.
> To be fair this is not on microsoft for inventing S0, or even pushing for it for windows devices. It's on device manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo for dropping S3 from UEFI in favor of it.
It's like they don't even use their products
Oh who am I kidding, if they used they would notice all the bloatware on it and the shoddy build quality, etc
How do you hibernate with zram file? Is a seperate swap partition necessary for hibernating?
Even if I create 200% swap file, I get `Call to Hibernate failed: Not enough suitable swap space for hibernation available on compatible block devices and file systems` on fedora 40.
Modern standby has existed for longer than ACPI did when modern standby was introduced.
Yes I know ACPI was ratified in 1996 but it didn't ACTUALLY exist until 1998 and I would argue it wasn't actually implemented until early 2000 for enterprise users and 2001 for consumers.
Every single criticism, every single one, levied at modern standby was also made against pre-modern standby ACPI.
In addition to that, tech luminaries too numerous to count ranted for years and years and years that ACPI was a secret evil plot by the NSA to I don't know, kidnap your dog or something. That's not an exaggeration. That actually happened 20+ years ago.
> Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.
Linus Torvalds, 2003. https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7279 He's talking here about pre-modern standby ACPI, the standard everyone loves and misses today and writes long articles eulogizing.
I'm going to chalk this up to people hating change for the sake of hating change.
edit: I'm actually gonna chalk this up to hating for the sake of hating. I know, you know, and I know that you know that if old-skool BIOS was the standard, Hacker News would be flooded with 10,000 word Medium articles about how the evil tech companies are conspiring to keep our systems insecure so the NSA can kidnap our dogs and if pre-Modern Standby was the standard there'd be stories hating on that too.
It's like how haxxors reminisce about the days when the CPU bus was exposed on a port or card-edge connector out the back of a machine and everything was "so free and open" but when a modern interface with 1/10,000,000,000th the number of vulnerabilities is introduced those same people hate on it.
Nobody is mad that "modern standby" exists. We're mad that actual standby is no longer supported on modern hardware. It's very annoying to have to hibernate a laptop when you put it in a bag or else it will overheat and possibly crash.
I struggled to get through the top half of this post, which is about various Thinkpad model types that the author had. But the second part, where the author explains the various sleep modes and what it means, was very informative & worth a read!
I've personally always solved this problem by enabling "Hibernate" (not sure if that's a Windows-specific term) which writes the entire RAM contents to a file and then shuts down completely. The downside is that it takes a few seconds to boot (impressively few seconds on a modern machine, actually), but still, the laptop doesn't come on instantly. But I like knowing that there's no chance the laptop somehow turns on and overheats/drains in the backpack, because it's completely off.
This doesn't take away from the author's rant at all, the idea that a sleep mode would need to support notifications or updates (!) is absurd. A good sleep mode would need to only support "minimum power usage" and "fast wake-up" and nothing else. But with MS's usual mix of excellence and absurd stupidity, that appears to not exist, and "hibernate" is to me an acceptable compromise. My understanding is that Macbooks have gotten this right for decades already, pretty nuts that PCs lag behind so much.
I used to be able to just close the lid on my laptop and forget about it for days. Nowadays with the new laptop provided by my employer, if I close the lid wrong, it doesn't even go to sleep and the battery drains completely (which is... understandable, I guess, since it didn't go to sleep) but even if I do all the rituals and it goes to sleep, the battery still drains away within a few hours. I can't full charge my laptop at the end of the workday, keep my VS and stuff open, and just the laptop to sleep. I have to shut it down properly and then start everything back up again the next morning.
I noticed that my HP only really goes to sleep if I close the lid WHEN UNPLUGGED (Windows settings get ignored or whatever reason). In case other laptops work the same, glad to be of help :)
My employer disabled sleep entirely for some reason (not even available via the power menu), which means that if I forget to hibernate it before I throw it in my bag it’s concerningly hot by the time I get home.
What’s double weird is that, if I close it without hibernating it, not only does it not lock the laptop but it seems to prevent the “lock after x minutes inactivity” setting kicking in. Which seems like a huge security problem.
This is one the primary reasons I use a MacBook (the other being the trackpad). Instant and reliable on/off when I close/open the lid, without ever worrying about it is something I just take for granted.
If I need a mouse and do a controlled shutdown/boot I might as well use a desktop.
The fact that it has worked for a decade+ over hardware revisions and OS updates is the key thing here.
Windows worked for a while, then didn't, then it worked again.
I actually destroyed a Windows laptop with a faulty lid suspend. Closed the lid, put it in a laptop bag and drove 3 hours. Got there and it was 100% dead, cooked itself alive pretty much by overheating in the bag.
Linux sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on hardware and software versions. It might work at first, then you update the OS and it breaks again.
I’m thankful this is back to being almost flawless with ARM Macs. Back in the day it worked great too (my first Mac was 2009) but in my anecdotal experience a lot of the later Intel Macs would go to sleep just fine but really did not want to wake back up again, on a semi-regular basis.
Yep that's true. It's impressively fast on my brand new 32GB HP Spectre though.
Side-rant: It's nuts how hard it is to find a good laptop that has 64G RAM, let alone "more than 64G" as you cite. I finally thought I found one in a Thinkpad X1 2-in-1, but then it just had terrible build quality, broken speakers (low rumbling sound, unfixable even after a repair and a replacement), badly working components (eg fingerprint reader) etc. I ended up returning it. The HP is a full 1000 euros cheaper (!), and it's better in every way (incl processor speed) except the smaller RAM. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
To date, I have always use 16 GB RAM on laptops, and "hard work" is done on a remote server via SSH.
This also alleviates the problem of sync'ing between multople laptops, as I use both a MacBook Air (lighter + better mobility: wake-up, WiFi, handling media) and a Lenovo X1 (Linux environment for software development and research).
That is just peak level stupidity. I sometimes boot into Windows, and every time Windows Update runs, the fans are on high, my system is taken hostage ("Do not turn off your computer - updates ready 100%" - showing for 15 minutes), and there is nothing I can do about it.
Compared to this, an `apt upgrade` is basically an instant action (only kernel updates take a bit longer). Too bad Ubuntu is trying to break that with snap, but it is still a minor inconvenience.
Its even worse if you have a bitlocker config that requires a pin.
It will reboot during the update but then fail the boot because noone entered the pin in time, leaving you to complete the update actively when you open it back up.
Ironically this happens even if you select "update and shutdown" because the restart happens during the update process.
I wouldn‘t call the always–on feature stupid but deliberate. The purpose of modern Windows being an ad surface and capture device for learning everything the user knows from user interaction. Switching off Windows Updates, even on Windows Pro and Windows 10, is practically impossible, short of isolating it from net access.
I suspect that the real reason for this change is to ensure that Windows gets updated even if the laptop is sleeping, and that this is a change that enterprise customers have asked for.
In the past where a computer would be connected to the corporate network all the time you could usually get Wake-on-LAN to work so you could boot computers at night to apply updates and ensure that users weren't waiting around forever. With laptops and people working remotely you need a new way to ensure that the bulk of the updates happen when they won't interfere with users trying to work - this is the solution.
Microsoft may well tout additional potential benefits, but that's more about selling it to consumers so they don't complain about changes as much.
And, of course, some manufacturers do a better job than others at implementing this. --I haven't had a problem with any of my Lenovo laptops or even the Surface laptop. Dell, on the other hand, doesn't seem to implement it well at all.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but trying to show ads when the laptop lid is closed and the machine is in "sleep mode" (with quotes) is not exactly smart, is it. But again, if MS can still charge their advertisers for such silliness, maybe it makes economical sense (for MS).
It also violates the core idea of sleep mode: Keep the current state of my computer intact until I continue working. If a windows update forces a reboot, then that computer state will be lost.
IIRC you can’t run updates while the laptop is asleep though, as that typically requires a user password to initiate. Even with MDM you can’t force updates during sleep
if it would work correctly it's acctually a grate UX boon for the user
basically you don't block any bandwidth while a user is using the computer and instead when they are not
also you download slower (less bandwidth) in the background because you have much more time available to download it (like e.g. the whole night)
this feature is also only about downloads, that windows tends to force apply updates once they are downloaded is a different unrelated issue altogether
so theoretically especially for laptops which are only used idk. 1-2h max a day for people with not so fast internet this could be grate
could because it isn't, due to implementation details
e.g. you would only want to run this if you are: plugged in (power), the internet is reliable (at least as reliable as "normally" for any given network) etc.
but AFIK it doesn't really detect changes in power status, doesn't detect bad natwork conditions (which can lead to increased power use), and probably doesn't use "intentional slow" download either
you also can't opt out
so yeah it seems shit with how it's implemented -- but the idea by itself isn't bad
No one has to call Torvalds, they can patch the stuff themselves if they're in such a hurry that they can't wait the few hours/days for a contributor to push a patch.
You are completely missing the point of the original comment. Why is my computer unusable for X minutes when I didn't expect that and perhaps, needed some critical work done?
Me too - to those using acronyms and other abbreviations in their writing, even "obvious ones": it is a good practice to introduce what each stands for the first time it gets used.
ACL = Access Control List / Association for Computational Linguistics
AAA = Authentication Authorization, Accounting / American Automobile Association / Triple-A Battery Size
...
S3 = AWS Simple Storage Service / ACPI Sleep States: S3 is one of them, they range from S0 - S5) / Suspend-to-Idle (S0ix) "Windows 10" mode selected in system firmware, "s2idle" selected in /sys/power/mem_sleep, and Suspend-to-RAM (S3)
Same! It's unfortunate that the names collide. I was also totally confused.
From the article,
> Traditional Sleep requires all system hardware and software components to work together. The operating system must support Sleep, as well as the hardware (e.g. CPU) and the BIOS/UEFI. According to the UEFI to Hardware Interface Standard (ACPI), this usual form of sleep is referred to as S3. S3 is a Sleep State in which all system components, except for the RAM and CPU Cache, are powered off.
Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere? A lot of the theoretical benefits of it, IMO, have been relatively theoretical. Perhaps Windows updates, but the computers I've used with Modern Standby still have to spend time installing updates when awake.
I cannot imagine what the benefit of receiving notifications and other information like this on a Windows system would be. As far as I know, very, very few apps are programmed for the native "App" development flow (or even to use the notifications api) as opposed to "desktop" apps, and the number only gets smaller as you go into long tail enterprise apps. Perhaps this was designed for Outlook, but I think the use case is dubious.
Of course, there are millions of laptops in the wild, many of which are undoubtedly used by the people who work on Windows. Every time I find the laptop closed and running its fans, or find a computer in a bag that is slightly warm near the CPU (expected behaviour of working Modern Standby), I wonder whether it's just my computer or if it's every single one of them out there. Do people just accept that their computer has to be either shut down or will have an unknown amount of remaining power? It seems like there would have been a huge push to get this fixed if it was really broken, but I rarely hear users talking about it.
Of course I do wonder whether with the advent of the new Qualcomm ARM CPUs, whether they have finally managed to get Modern Standby to be a good clone of what Android devices do...
> Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere?
Why do you think it was created to deliver value to the customer?
It is merely a reason for Microsoft to spy^Hextract value from a customer even when the PC is sleeping. Like humans, laptop spend a third of their life in sleep mode and it would be nice to monetise that time, multiplied by a couple billion users.
I think it is clear that the goal of the Windows division is to milk every user for all their worth. By the time they are done, laptops will be an obsolete product and Microsoft doesn't really want to support Windows 20 more years.
>Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere?
Why is this important, or even something to consider? The only thing that's important with Windows and features in it is whether something delivers value to Microsoft.
But does it? Nobody asked for it, it's not even meaningfully used by any Microsoft product and can't drive sales for them, its endless litany of bugs just increase support workloads.
> Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere?
I guess the value is for enterprise users because the ecosystem is so bad.
When I return from sleep on my laptop, my VPN is disconnected and can't reconnect itself automatically as I need to go through the auth + 2FA phase. I am also logged of all Azure AD authenticated web apps and Microsoft web apps like Teams and Outlook are so bad they don't automatically sign in back when you have signed on on other Azure AD resources.
I haven't started my corporate laptop on the original windows 10 for years so I can't compare but I imagine a "modern standby" would have some keepalive on the VPN connections and apps like teams so they don't sign you out?
But in the end this is kind of useless on those Dell laptops because it drains the battery so fast and they have such a low battery life that you just want to shut them down if they are not connected to their docking statino. I guess it serves the people who are on-prem and close the lid to go from one meeting room to another.
But when I was working on-prem I would just configure it to just lock the laptop and would use the sleep shortcut to put the laptop to a normal sleep. Apparently most people were too dumb to figure that out and would walk between their desk and the meeting room awkwardly with the lid up, I can't believe they have managers roles or are even allowed to work in the IT industry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Keeping VPN connections alive could be beneficial. Most current laptops do not have cellular modem though so they will have no internet connection while being transported. VPN will therefore stop working anyway. In fact the entire laptop will stop working when it overheats in the bag.
I guess this was pitched by some product person as the feature that brings the laptop on and connects to wifi instantly when you open the lid. All the other uses are post facto justifications. This was all dreamt up when Apple was still on x86. Obviously, now that Apple has superior battery life, these gimmicks don't make any sense.
What I don't understand is, if this issue is so pervasive, why aren't these laptop models getting terrible reviews by both professional and non-professional reviewers ?
Modern Standby enables much faster return from Standby. You open the lid of your device and it's there. That's not the case with S3. I find it adds a lot of convenience.
My 10 year old Thinkpad with S3 wakes up in the time it takes to open the lid, with almost as much battery as it had when I put it to sleep days ago.
My shiny new work laptop without S3 wakes up in the same time, and then says "Battery critically low, shutting down."
This is not a convenience, it's insubordination. I told it to sleep, and it didn't.
But you know what's really insane? When the new work laptop is just sitting there with the screen locked and I walk up and hit a key, it takes longer to just display the password box than the 10 year old Thinkpad takes to wake up from S3 and display the password box. (Ok, it's an unfair comparison, Windows vs Linux, but still...)
How is this the case? Suspend to/from RAM on Linux wakes up in less than a second in my experience. Which makes sense, because everything is still in RAM and systemd doesn't need to do a bunch of work to get everything back online. Maybe Windows has a weird implementation of S3?
Funny, one of the reason why I started heavily using S4 rather than S3 was because with SSDs the time to restart from swap was so fast that it was barely more an inconvenience.
> Perhaps this was designed for Outlook, but I think the use case is dubious.
Oh, sweet summer child. I sometimes use Windows on my work machine, complete with the "new" Teams and "new" Outlook. For some reason, these need a while to update when I wake my machine from sleep, even though it usually sleeps connected to power, with a network cord plugged in and in range of Wi-Fi. Teams, in particular, will say it's offline for a few minutes, even though I can browse the web as soon as the box actually becomes interactive.
The computer actually does something while asleep, judging by how hot it gets. But, as you say, it's really not clear what. It will do this even though Defender is deactivated (we have some other handbrake at work which doesn't do a full system scan on its own) and the system is fully up-to-date.
One of the top reasons I'm staying with MacBooks. It's not unusual for my laptop to have hundreds of days of uptime. Going back to shutting down everything every time I close the lid is unusable for me at this point.
Whoever fixes this first will make a lot of money.
Edit: SteamDeck is also very good at this and that's why I'm sticking to it for handheld gaming.
MacBooks aren't immune to sleep issues either though. Mine used to forget the external display about a fifth of the time, and forget it has any display at all once every 20 or 30 lid close->open cycle.
The solution happened to be unplug and replug for the first issue, and force reboot for the second. I've enough people having issues with external displays that I don't think it's an isolated problem.
For comparison a Surface Pro failing to go to sleep or getting hot in the bag hasn't happened to me in 2 years of owning these machines. It might surely happen, but it's far from a regular occurrence I think.
It depends what your risk profile is. There are no absolutes.
Numerous minor updates have screwed up things for me, particularly with some applications I rely on. I will usually lag 2-3 patches behind and wait for other people to suffer first and confirm what I use is stable. I am still on Sonoma / 14.5 at the moment.
Incidentally I actually have a Mac Pro here which is running Monterey which hasn't been patched for about 9 months. The universe has not and will not be imploding any time soon.
Everyone forgets the "availability" bit of security.
I find it a bit surprising that this is still a thing. Why is there ever a time when I _must_ reboot? Is it just that mainstream kernels were designed at a time when people had lower expectations around this sort of thing, and now it's too hard to evolve their designs toward something that would allow for zero-downtime patching in ~all cases?
Other examples that make me wonder if it's mostly because people haven't demanded better:
- Enormous updates for all kinds of things (gigabytes for a bug fix release) because differential updates aren't pervasive.
- Windows updates where a huge amount of work is done during the "rebooting" phase (why can't most of this be done before reboot?)
- Absolutely atrocious power management on pretty much anything that's not a MacBook, and even not perfect on those.
I never thought we'd have flying cars by now, but if you asked me a decade ago to predict the future of operating systems... it wouldn't be this.
Is there a specific piece of software or driver you got installed on all of them? I've owned 2 of 3 of your MacBook model years and 'sleep on lid close' was very reliable on all of them.
Apple Silicon works even better, resume from sleep is instanteneous instead of taking 1-2 seconds.
If I leave it on sleep for a long time it dies also. But it's perfect for playing games in short breaks, especially with kids. I can immediately drop it when one wakes up crying and return back to it a few hours later and pick up where I've left off.
Closing the lid and putting it into the bag has the same effect for me.
I've my own ritual for preparing myself for the "I am done" phase. Doing the last commits, writing down a few sentences on what should I do when I go back to work and closing the lid.
I have to restart my MacBook every few days unfortunately because sometimes it just has weird issues (like usb devices or networking stopping working).
The issue is not for one person or company to fix. Just like it's impossible to convince all the OSS desktop folks to follow one displayserver/toolkit/UX paradigm it's equally impossible to enforce bug free hardware and drivers from all the PC hardware manufacturers and whatever Microsoft is doing at the moment it seems fixing this is very low on the priority list...
I only use mine occasionally, so I turn it off an put in a drawer. When I power it on a few months later the battery is flat, and the machines date in far in the past.
This have never happened with any other laptop I've had.
Good you do not hold a company-controlled macbook where they force you (after annoying you to death) to do OS upgrades that may break software they themselves provide and require you to use. And then tell you to wait the next of apple's update or some fix because there is nothing they can do. At least windows updates usually do not break software. Unless something gets corrupted or wrong on the way and it does not boot to the OS at all, in which case good luck.
Note that security updates are independent of the OS updates (or should be). There is no real excuse of forcing a user upgrade an OS version.
Otherwise under personal use/control macbooks are great, though, in not forcing you do updates of annoy you to death about them.
Windows updates have lately been causing lots of problems, from relatively benign things like getting stuck in background failure loops to more problematic things like silently removing drivers to outright nasty things like constant BSODs. Using both macOS and Windows regularly, I'd say the two companies are neck and neck for how cavalierly they've been breaking things with major OS updates.
Laptop manufacturers on their own clearly didn't hurt this (dying) category enough over the years prioritizing shallow form over functionality and constant design regressions, Microsoft had to push some more of their deranged "vision" too. S0ix was a joke when introduced years ago and remains one, but it's not funny to laugh at it anymore because its existence eventually killed the actual sleep state an user expects. There is, without an ounce of doubt, no benefit for an user to have their laptop device continue operating when it's expected to be "sleeping" without intentional, conscious instruction to resume work. Some of the proclaimed advantages to it I distinctly remember were "receiving emails" and "automatic updates when the device is not in use", and while the former is mostly useless because it's not a smartphone, the latter is actively harmful to an user's interests when unprompted. Hibernation on linux and windows (where it's secretly kept away for whatever reason since 8 or so) is far more predictable with any modern sabotaged devices missing S3 support, and modern drives are performant and large enough that it's not going to make much of a difference, at least for pauses that one expects to last more than an hour or two. Some more of the endless compromises to put up with because of unrestrained "courage".
This has destroyed one of my older laptops, it decided on its own to patch itself while in a laptop bag in sleep mode. It was a "workstation" laptop that can draw something like 60W from battery, and it promptly cooked itself. The plastic melted and smoke was coming out of the bag. On a moving train.
Here's the thing: this self-serving behaviour from Microsoft will eventually kill someone, or quite possibly a large number of people. It's just a matter of time until a high-powered laptop does this in someone's luggage on a plane, catches fire, and then there will be congressional investigations like we had with the Boeing 737 MCAS system.
In both cases near-monopoly companies are gambling with peoples' lives to meet some internal KPI that in the grand scheme of things just doesn't matter... but it does to some manager's bonus, so you see... people are going to have to die.
Thing is.... My gigantic desktop computer has thermal cutoffs, it will shut down if the CPU gets too hot. I remember desktop PCs having that for ages. I've had overheating laptops do the same. Are laptop manufacturers just getting lazy and skimping on failsafe hardware temperature cut-offs!?? Like, as a hardware manufacturer I would always add that factor-of-5 "the software side WILL fuck up" safety measures. How is the HARDWARE allowing software to let it melt itself in this day and age!?
It's probably because the hardware was not designed to be operating at full power surrounded by insulation (i.e. in a bag). In that scenario the parts that the hardware monitors may still be at 'acceptable' temperatures (which can be ~100C), while other (unmonitored) parts that would not normally get that hot get way too hot.
Having accountants and not engineers architecting software and hardware gets you to that point. Crappy engineers don’t help too, there are too many unskilled people in „IT”
„old” and „legacy” hardware 8-10 years ago was fighting with the tasks and you could still put laptop on your legs. Funny enough yesterday I went into this sleep stuff, because my 5yo Dell battery drained while being „shut down” after 1.5 weeks and while charging I tried to run 2 tabs in browser to look for fix and my legs burned - so I had to put it diagonally on the table to cool down.
We have order of magnitude faster hardware capable of doing order of magnitude less things.
Readit News
Regardless of a valid use case for "modern standby", there is DEFINITELY a use case for "old suspend to RAM" and "old hybrid suspend to RAM", which have de facto been blown away by the change.
I have no problem with adding a new sleep state that makes sense for other users. Go ahead and add S22 for that exotic sleep state manufacturing robots use between shifts. S344 for bluetooth devices waiting for reconnection. Whatever, I don't care. But don't replace an existing PRIMARY UI PATTERN with them.
To be fair this is not on microsoft for inventing S0, or even pushing for it for windows devices. It's on device manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo for dropping S3 from UEFI in favor of it.
But in a nutshell, unplug your laptop before you close the lid. Windows does not suspend to modern standby when that happens. I always had an overcooked and dead laptop at the other end of my commute, which went away when I started unplugging first. Now my windows machine can go literal days in sleep mode without really impacting remaining battery that much.
- monitoring if power is unpluged
- monitoring if battery level sings below threshold
- monitor CPU temperature
and take appropriate actions, like transitioning to "classical" S3 or better hybrid S3
it's totally a misterious for me how that doesn't work well even 10 years later
I mean bugs which idk. unexpectedly drain a bit more battery etc. are to be expected but I would expect the UEFI to be like "uh that's too much CPU heat lets stop here", "uh that's draining the batter too fast let's stop", "uh only 40% batter better not even try anything". And sure you want hello to work even with <40% battery but that's if its enabled, which often it isn't.
Note that even CPU manufacturers no longer provide firmware development support for making S3 work on recent series of CPUs. (Apparently some get an exception, as I’ve heard of some laptops from large brands that are sold with Linux and do have S3 support in the firmware.)
Once upon a time, there were fifty times as many Windows laptops as Linux (by which I mean debian, mint, etc) and Linux was ignorable. Now the factor is closer to ten, and I find it difficult to believe that device manufacturers simply ignore that. If they don't support S3, there likely is a better reason than the dominance of Windows.
It's like they don't even use their products
Oh who am I kidding, if they used they would notice all the bloatware on it and the shoddy build quality, etc
Even if I create 200% swap file, I get `Call to Hibernate failed: Not enough suitable swap space for hibernation available on compatible block devices and file systems` on fedora 40.
You might be new to Microsoft (and Google). /s
I think somedody told them that you cannnot sale the same GUI for more money so they keep "inovating".
Yes I know ACPI was ratified in 1996 but it didn't ACTUALLY exist until 1998 and I would argue it wasn't actually implemented until early 2000 for enterprise users and 2001 for consumers.
Every single criticism, every single one, levied at modern standby was also made against pre-modern standby ACPI.
In addition to that, tech luminaries too numerous to count ranted for years and years and years that ACPI was a secret evil plot by the NSA to I don't know, kidnap your dog or something. That's not an exaggeration. That actually happened 20+ years ago.
> Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.
Linus Torvalds, 2003. https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7279 He's talking here about pre-modern standby ACPI, the standard everyone loves and misses today and writes long articles eulogizing.
I'm going to chalk this up to people hating change for the sake of hating change.
edit: I'm actually gonna chalk this up to hating for the sake of hating. I know, you know, and I know that you know that if old-skool BIOS was the standard, Hacker News would be flooded with 10,000 word Medium articles about how the evil tech companies are conspiring to keep our systems insecure so the NSA can kidnap our dogs and if pre-Modern Standby was the standard there'd be stories hating on that too.
It's like how haxxors reminisce about the days when the CPU bus was exposed on a port or card-edge connector out the back of a machine and everything was "so free and open" but when a modern interface with 1/10,000,000,000th the number of vulnerabilities is introduced those same people hate on it.
I've personally always solved this problem by enabling "Hibernate" (not sure if that's a Windows-specific term) which writes the entire RAM contents to a file and then shuts down completely. The downside is that it takes a few seconds to boot (impressively few seconds on a modern machine, actually), but still, the laptop doesn't come on instantly. But I like knowing that there's no chance the laptop somehow turns on and overheats/drains in the backpack, because it's completely off.
This doesn't take away from the author's rant at all, the idea that a sleep mode would need to support notifications or updates (!) is absurd. A good sleep mode would need to only support "minimum power usage" and "fast wake-up" and nothing else. But with MS's usual mix of excellence and absurd stupidity, that appears to not exist, and "hibernate" is to me an acceptable compromise. My understanding is that Macbooks have gotten this right for decades already, pretty nuts that PCs lag behind so much.
What’s double weird is that, if I close it without hibernating it, not only does it not lock the laptop but it seems to prevent the “lock after x minutes inactivity” setting kicking in. Which seems like a huge security problem.
If I need a mouse and do a controlled shutdown/boot I might as well use a desktop.
Windows worked for a while, then didn't, then it worked again.
I actually destroyed a Windows laptop with a faulty lid suspend. Closed the lid, put it in a laptop bag and drove 3 hours. Got there and it was 100% dead, cooked itself alive pretty much by overheating in the bag.
Linux sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on hardware and software versions. It might work at first, then you update the OS and it breaks again.
Side-rant: It's nuts how hard it is to find a good laptop that has 64G RAM, let alone "more than 64G" as you cite. I finally thought I found one in a Thinkpad X1 2-in-1, but then it just had terrible build quality, broken speakers (low rumbling sound, unfixable even after a repair and a replacement), badly working components (eg fingerprint reader) etc. I ended up returning it. The HP is a full 1000 euros cheaper (!), and it's better in every way (incl processor speed) except the smaller RAM. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
This also alleviates the problem of sync'ing between multople laptops, as I use both a MacBook Air (lighter + better mobility: wake-up, WiFi, handling media) and a Lenovo X1 (Linux environment for software development and research).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_an...
That is just peak level stupidity. I sometimes boot into Windows, and every time Windows Update runs, the fans are on high, my system is taken hostage ("Do not turn off your computer - updates ready 100%" - showing for 15 minutes), and there is nothing I can do about it.
Compared to this, an `apt upgrade` is basically an instant action (only kernel updates take a bit longer). Too bad Ubuntu is trying to break that with snap, but it is still a minor inconvenience.
In the past where a computer would be connected to the corporate network all the time you could usually get Wake-on-LAN to work so you could boot computers at night to apply updates and ensure that users weren't waiting around forever. With laptops and people working remotely you need a new way to ensure that the bulk of the updates happen when they won't interfere with users trying to work - this is the solution.
Microsoft may well tout additional potential benefits, but that's more about selling it to consumers so they don't complain about changes as much.
And, of course, some manufacturers do a better job than others at implementing this. --I haven't had a problem with any of my Lenovo laptops or even the Surface laptop. Dell, on the other hand, doesn't seem to implement it well at all.
> That is just peak level stupidity.
It also violates the core idea of sleep mode: Keep the current state of my computer intact until I continue working. If a windows update forces a reboot, then that computer state will be lost.
And any issues related to applying updates after downloading them has nothing to do with this issue.
basically you don't block any bandwidth while a user is using the computer and instead when they are not
also you download slower (less bandwidth) in the background because you have much more time available to download it (like e.g. the whole night)
this feature is also only about downloads, that windows tends to force apply updates once they are downloaded is a different unrelated issue altogether
so theoretically especially for laptops which are only used idk. 1-2h max a day for people with not so fast internet this could be grate
could because it isn't, due to implementation details
e.g. you would only want to run this if you are: plugged in (power), the internet is reliable (at least as reliable as "normally" for any given network) etc.
but AFIK it doesn't really detect changes in power status, doesn't detect bad natwork conditions (which can lead to increased power use), and probably doesn't use "intentional slow" download either
you also can't opt out
so yeah it seems shit with how it's implemented -- but the idea by itself isn't bad
The same cannot be said about Windows.
The major H1/H2 releases take a bit longer, up to 15 minutes. But not stuck at 100%.
Yeah right, implying everyone should get specified hardware to have a decent user experience definitely seem to be making sense.
From the article,
> Traditional Sleep requires all system hardware and software components to work together. The operating system must support Sleep, as well as the hardware (e.g. CPU) and the BIOS/UEFI. According to the UEFI to Hardware Interface Standard (ACPI), this usual form of sleep is referred to as S3. S3 is a Sleep State in which all system components, except for the RAM and CPU Cache, are powered off.
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I cannot imagine what the benefit of receiving notifications and other information like this on a Windows system would be. As far as I know, very, very few apps are programmed for the native "App" development flow (or even to use the notifications api) as opposed to "desktop" apps, and the number only gets smaller as you go into long tail enterprise apps. Perhaps this was designed for Outlook, but I think the use case is dubious.
Of course, there are millions of laptops in the wild, many of which are undoubtedly used by the people who work on Windows. Every time I find the laptop closed and running its fans, or find a computer in a bag that is slightly warm near the CPU (expected behaviour of working Modern Standby), I wonder whether it's just my computer or if it's every single one of them out there. Do people just accept that their computer has to be either shut down or will have an unknown amount of remaining power? It seems like there would have been a huge push to get this fixed if it was really broken, but I rarely hear users talking about it.
Of course I do wonder whether with the advent of the new Qualcomm ARM CPUs, whether they have finally managed to get Modern Standby to be a good clone of what Android devices do...
Why do you think it was created to deliver value to the customer?
It is merely a reason for Microsoft to spy^Hextract value from a customer even when the PC is sleeping. Like humans, laptop spend a third of their life in sleep mode and it would be nice to monetise that time, multiplied by a couple billion users.
I think it is clear that the goal of the Windows division is to milk every user for all their worth. By the time they are done, laptops will be an obsolete product and Microsoft doesn't really want to support Windows 20 more years.
Why is this important, or even something to consider? The only thing that's important with Windows and features in it is whether something delivers value to Microsoft.
I guess the value is for enterprise users because the ecosystem is so bad.
When I return from sleep on my laptop, my VPN is disconnected and can't reconnect itself automatically as I need to go through the auth + 2FA phase. I am also logged of all Azure AD authenticated web apps and Microsoft web apps like Teams and Outlook are so bad they don't automatically sign in back when you have signed on on other Azure AD resources.
I haven't started my corporate laptop on the original windows 10 for years so I can't compare but I imagine a "modern standby" would have some keepalive on the VPN connections and apps like teams so they don't sign you out?
But in the end this is kind of useless on those Dell laptops because it drains the battery so fast and they have such a low battery life that you just want to shut them down if they are not connected to their docking statino. I guess it serves the people who are on-prem and close the lid to go from one meeting room to another.
But when I was working on-prem I would just configure it to just lock the laptop and would use the sleep shortcut to put the laptop to a normal sleep. Apparently most people were too dumb to figure that out and would walk between their desk and the meeting room awkwardly with the lid up, I can't believe they have managers roles or are even allowed to work in the IT industry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My shiny new work laptop without S3 wakes up in the same time, and then says "Battery critically low, shutting down."
This is not a convenience, it's insubordination. I told it to sleep, and it didn't.
But you know what's really insane? When the new work laptop is just sitting there with the screen locked and I walk up and hit a key, it takes longer to just display the password box than the 10 year old Thinkpad takes to wake up from S3 and display the password box. (Ok, it's an unfair comparison, Windows vs Linux, but still...)
Modern standby is making my laptop unpredictable, and that is very inconvenient for me
How is this the case? Suspend to/from RAM on Linux wakes up in less than a second in my experience. Which makes sense, because everything is still in RAM and systemd doesn't need to do a bunch of work to get everything back online. Maybe Windows has a weird implementation of S3?
And S3 is basically «instant».
So I don't see much point in S2Idle/S0ix.
Oh, sweet summer child. I sometimes use Windows on my work machine, complete with the "new" Teams and "new" Outlook. For some reason, these need a while to update when I wake my machine from sleep, even though it usually sleeps connected to power, with a network cord plugged in and in range of Wi-Fi. Teams, in particular, will say it's offline for a few minutes, even though I can browse the web as soon as the box actually becomes interactive.
The computer actually does something while asleep, judging by how hot it gets. But, as you say, it's really not clear what. It will do this even though Defender is deactivated (we have some other handbrake at work which doesn't do a full system scan on its own) and the system is fully up-to-date.
Whoever fixes this first will make a lot of money.
Edit: SteamDeck is also very good at this and that's why I'm sticking to it for handheld gaming.
The solution happened to be unplug and replug for the first issue, and force reboot for the second. I've enough people having issues with external displays that I don't think it's an isolated problem.
For comparison a Surface Pro failing to go to sleep or getting hot in the bag hasn't happened to me in 2 years of owning these machines. It might surely happen, but it's far from a regular occurrence I think.
This isn’t something to be proud of. It means that you’re not applying the regularly-released security updates.
macOS is spectacularly good at restoring state on reboot. It’s like it never happened.
Update your software.
Numerous minor updates have screwed up things for me, particularly with some applications I rely on. I will usually lag 2-3 patches behind and wait for other people to suffer first and confirm what I use is stable. I am still on Sonoma / 14.5 at the moment.
Incidentally I actually have a Mac Pro here which is running Monterey which hasn't been patched for about 9 months. The universe has not and will not be imploding any time soon.
Everyone forgets the "availability" bit of security.
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I don't disagree, but also...
I find it a bit surprising that this is still a thing. Why is there ever a time when I _must_ reboot? Is it just that mainstream kernels were designed at a time when people had lower expectations around this sort of thing, and now it's too hard to evolve their designs toward something that would allow for zero-downtime patching in ~all cases?
Other examples that make me wonder if it's mostly because people haven't demanded better:
- Enormous updates for all kinds of things (gigabytes for a bug fix release) because differential updates aren't pervasive. - Windows updates where a huge amount of work is done during the "rebooting" phase (why can't most of this be done before reboot?) - Absolutely atrocious power management on pretty much anything that's not a MacBook, and even not perfect on those.
I never thought we'd have flying cars by now, but if you asked me a decade ago to predict the future of operating systems... it wouldn't be this.
edit: maybe not the specific S3 sleep problem but a general inability to sleep correctly
I've my own ritual for preparing myself for the "I am done" phase. Doing the last commits, writing down a few sentences on what should I do when I go back to work and closing the lid.
This have never happened with any other laptop I've had.
I got woken up in the night a couple of times because of my macbook doing that.
Note that security updates are independent of the OS updates (or should be). There is no real excuse of forcing a user upgrade an OS version.
Otherwise under personal use/control macbooks are great, though, in not forcing you do updates of annoy you to death about them.
Here's the thing: this self-serving behaviour from Microsoft will eventually kill someone, or quite possibly a large number of people. It's just a matter of time until a high-powered laptop does this in someone's luggage on a plane, catches fire, and then there will be congressional investigations like we had with the Boeing 737 MCAS system.
In both cases near-monopoly companies are gambling with peoples' lives to meet some internal KPI that in the grand scheme of things just doesn't matter... but it does to some manager's bonus, so you see... people are going to have to die.
„old” and „legacy” hardware 8-10 years ago was fighting with the tasks and you could still put laptop on your legs. Funny enough yesterday I went into this sleep stuff, because my 5yo Dell battery drained while being „shut down” after 1.5 weeks and while charging I tried to run 2 tabs in browser to look for fix and my legs burned - so I had to put it diagonally on the table to cool down.
We have order of magnitude faster hardware capable of doing order of magnitude less things.