I have an older XPS where where the CPU still supports deep sleep (S3).

Most distros have it disabled by default now because neither AMD not Intel seem to officially support it in new CPUs (so windows will have the same problem)

To check if your cpu supports it, you can run: journalctl | grep S1

You should see a message that says something like CPU supports S1 S2 S3 etc. if S3 is there then deep sleep is supported and can be enabled.

Ubuntu instructions: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1029474/ubuntu-18-04-dell-xps13-9370-no-longer-suspends-on-lid-close/1036122#1036122

Fedora desktop or atomic instructions: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/laptop-appears-to-sleep-but-not-suspend/77193/4

Note, this is purely the fault of CPU manufacturers for being so shitty about proper sleep and yet another point that has to be conceeded to apple. Imagine explaining to a normal person that your XPS is really good and way cheaper than a Mac...but the batter will die overnight when you need it in the morning. Literally just shooting themselves in the foot.

Hibernate works as well but takes a bit longer. Hibernate also crashes in many modern systems but again works great in my older XPS. You have to manually activate this as well and it's really not to bad with a good ssd.

That being said his should all be very basic functionality so why do I have to do this manually. This shit is why people buy Macs.

There's also room for distros to improve here. The installer can probe the CPU and see if S3 is supported, if so it can use deep sleep automatically. Why do I have to mess with Kernal arguments?

Similar for hibernate, why doesn't the installer just have a check box that sets up the hibernate file/partition?

S0idle is a real problem.

Years ago you put your laptop in sleep S3 mode at 5PM, put in the backpack, resume it at 9AM the next morning and it lost maybe 10% battery.

Now S0idle is like a cellphone, always powered, so you put your laptop in a backpack, windows/Linux half support a botched S0 so some devices are still powered, either your laptop overheat or dies because battery reach 0% during the night.

Where can I find beforehand which laptop supports S3? Are there any know brands that do?

Unpopular opinion: the only vendor that does sleep right is Apple. The only reason they can is the tight vertical integration of the platform where they control all the hardware, all the drivers, and can exercise control over all the applications in the App Store.

More open platforms are essentially fucked.

S3 (hibernate) is conspicuously absent in many distros.

This is the result of Microsoft being so cozy with hardware vendors.

Yo, setup hibernation and use hybrid sleep as your default sleep.

ln -s /etc/systemd/system/suspend.target ../../../usr/lib/systemd/system/suspend-then-hibernate.target

Now any sleep is hybrid. The machine suspends, then wakes up after a timeout, and enters hibernation. The timeout is configurable in systemd-sleep.conf(5).

With this combo I find that I prefer S0 to S3. S0 drains the battery about twice as fast, sure, but it resumes instantaneously, while S3 takes about 30 seconds (!) to resume on this machine. And the thing hibernates and powers off if I leave it for an hour anyway.

Lol what is s3?

@JRepin Am I the only idiot who uses systemctl hibernate with a proper swap partition? Works perfect every time I've set it up.