this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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In 8 hours it uses 20% of the battery. When Windows or Mac are put to sleep, the damn things can sleep for a week! This is the case with Linux on multiple laptops.

Is there some kind of manipulation going by ring -1 that detects Linux is running? Is Linux not respecting some procedure and kissing a step?

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[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 24 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Worth noting that this is also an ongoing issue with windows. Only apple has actually solved this, and they do so by owning the whole stack. Each apple product has a specific OS, CPU, and motherboard that were all specifically designed with the end-product user-experience in mind.

But for PCs, the OS, CPU, and motherboard are all designed and built by different companies, each only designed to be generically compatible with the other components. None of them are designed for a specific end-product, so features that require all of the components to play perfectly together for a specific end-user experience (like sleep state) often end up not quite aligning.

None of this helps you, but I think it's worth understanding why the problem exists and why it may just always exist. The best bet is that companies like System76 or Valve solve sleep states for specific linux-based products, and then the rest of us maybe hopefully see some benefit from that.

But IMO this is just a trade-off. It's like a pick 2 situation between Customization, Stability, and Privacy (where a reliabile sleep state is Stability). You can have stability and customization, but you'll probably pay a lot, and the company who sold it will want telemetry data to improve the experience for others. You can have stability and privacy, but the product will be very locked down to a specific use case to ensure a stable experience.

[–] green_link@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's not that apple solved it, it's that Microsoft purposely fucked it up.

It's called "modern standby" and if you put your laptop to sleep while it is plugged into power, some windows services and wifi aren't actually put to sleep, and instead will ping windows update servers to download and install some updates while the machine is "asleep".

Even if and when you put the laptop to sleep while plugged into power and then remove power to say out the laptop in your bag. Those services that aren't put to sleep never check to see if you are still on wall power or battery and keep doing what they do draining the battery

Linus tech tips on YouTube did a whole deep dive into it. Some laptops you can disable modern standby through the command prompt but newer hardware doesn't allow for it. The only real workaround is unplug your laptop for a few seconds before putting it to sleep.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As I understand it, apple products support the same update from sleep feature, except it works for all the reasons stated above.

[–] green_link@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

I'm pretty sure all Microsoft needed to do was put in a check to see if it was running on battery or not. And I remember seeing that they finally fixed it months ago.

Modern windows is bogged down by decades old compatibility architecture. Shit programed in the 80s will still run on modern windows for the most part. All because corporations and businesses still run those programs or severs today and refuse to update or replace them. Look at the fucking US aviation industry. Billions of dollars in revenue and still run windows 95 level shit programs.

Microsoft needs to pull an apple and rebuild windows from the ground up without any compatibility layers. Enough is enough.

[–] zqps@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Components like CPUs and mainboards are absolutely purpose-built for laptops. And precisely this has caused a host of issues from locked-down BIOS/UEFI to broken sleep to incompatibility with real-time audio processing via ASIO, and that's just the ones I have personally experienced.

The real issue here is an outdated x86 architecture that was never designed for efficiency, which is severely struggling to compete with Apple's ARM-based M architecture, but which they can't get rid of for compatibility reasons.