I want a laptop that can ACTUALLY sleep!

Forums › Linux › I want a laptop that can ACTUALLY sleep!

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darylblake

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#3407837 27-Aug-2025 13:46

The problem really is x86. These chips draw too much power, and get hot. It seems to be getting better.... but from my experience ARM or Apple Silicon is much better.

For a laptop. I use a M1 Macbook Pro. Super happy. Its over 3 years old now, battery lasts a whole day for me.

If you get a M4 Mac air you will be fine and it will be lightweight.

There are some better x86 chips.... look around do research. If you wanna run x86 have a go at an OS like Omarchy 2.

With windows.. its kinda sorta ok but kinda broken. I got a thinkpad T14s here and it seems to be okay ish. I get about 3-4 hours on the battery... its a 13th Gen I7 mobile.... but personally would look at AMD offerings for laptops too these days.

nzben

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#3407841 27-Aug-2025 14:10

M1 MacBook Air.

A few years ago I was in Japan for 2 weeks, with laptop which was primarily used for dealing with AirBnB & other bookings, replying to emails, etc - so not used much, but used sporadically over the period of the trip. Also downloaded, processed and posted around 50 RAW files from a DSLR camera.

Didn't bother taking the charger, laptop was always in sleep mode (ie never shut down). Started the trip in NZ at 100%, when we arrived back home after 14 days there was still 20% remaining on the battery.

My daughter has inherited it and uses it daily at school, it's now 5 years old and she charges it once every 2 or 3 days with fairly regular use.

I do have it set to "low power mode when on battery" and can't tell the difference in performance when using it for day to day tasks (email, web, video, etc)

KiwiSurfer

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#3408697 29-Aug-2025 22:59

Modern Windows on modern Intel CPUs now does someting I believe is callled 'Hybrid Sleep' where it does both sleep to RAM and hibernation to HDD (hence the name Hybrid Sleep). If you wake it up within a certain timeframes it just wakes up instantly from RAM and the hibernation data is thrown away. Beyond a certain timeframe it will power down most components and 'waking' it up is actually a cold start where Windows will restore the RAM state from a hibernation file on the HDD. Works well on both HP and Lenovo in my experience.

To give you a idea of how well it works -- I just took out an old Lenovo Intel laptop running Windows 11 I haven't used since April this year and it woke up from hibernation with 30% battery life (more my fault for not charging it back to 100% before storing) and back into the apps that were running in April.

Pretty good and on par with my experiences of Windows/Intel laptops in the last decade or so. I concede it was very hit and miss 10+ years ago (even Apple Intel silicon wasn't great -- I had one that would go flat every night) but modern Intel latops are fantastic now days especially if you're running Wndows and your laptop manufactuer supplies good drivers.

loceff13

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#3408703 29-Aug-2025 23:25

My Asus TUF A15 just puts the fan to 100% and blank screen on 'sleep' and never turns off lol, thats the out of box experience..

TwoSeven

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#3408751 30-Aug-2025 13:32

From memory, Linux can only enter sleep mode at half past two on a Sunday afternoon, and only if the kernel is compiled 22 and three quarter minutes before hand with the correct compiler switches and one has a cirrus logic CL-GD510 chip made in 1988 😀

having said that I just use Linux in Windows 11 99% of the time (usually Ubuntu). I’m not a fan of laptops having moved to an iPad, but if I did want something like that it would either be some kind of ultrabook or probably a MacBook Air.

On my windows workstation I have it set to sleep after a couple of hours and hibernate after say something like 12 hours. The main difference between the two is that sleep keeps the memory active, hibernate does a physical power down (but is also slower to start).

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Santo93

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#3408903 30-Aug-2025 22:42

Hi Everyone!

Thanks for the tips: I SOLVED IT!

with all the tips about hibernation, disabling the wifi kernel module etc... I looked into it and this is what i found:

I went into the BIOS and turned off intel VAB (found the suggestion on googles AI summary, AI is good for some things i guess)
- This decreased drain from 10-15%/hr down to about 6%/hr.
I updated the BIOS
- 3%/hr
I changed the sleep settings to hibernate "deep" sleep instead of s2 sleep:
- About 0-1% drain per hour.

To make this change permanent, you can pass a setting to the Grub bootloader (source). As the root user:

Source: https://gist.github.com/julianlam/166823c982fd20ee4a748442cc77bbef

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