I want a laptop that can ACTUALLY sleep!

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Santo93

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#321526 25-Aug-2025 09:55

Hey All,

I want a linux laptop (preferably mint) that can ACTUALLY sleep, and not run out of battery in a day or two. I only use my laptop sparingly, and having to charge it every single time before using it is a pain. I am thinking a snapdragon, or M2 chip, but I am not sure how mature linux support is for them.

has anyone tried it? how is the sleep mode?

I know that battery life will not work as well as the OEM OS, I just want something that sleeps properly and i can open it a week later, and still have 25% battery for a quick task.

I currently have a i5-1135G7 Asus laptop

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#3407182 25-Aug-2025 10:23

How about going to hibernate??

Regards,

Old3eyes

michaelmurfy

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#3407193 25-Aug-2025 11:13

A MacBook running MacOS is your best bet. Sure, it’s not Linux but you do get a full terminal and Linux containers are coming in the next release of MacOS.

Outside of this, you can run Docker and VM’s if there is anything specific with Linux you need.

Battery life is amazing on MacOS devices and performance is also great. Go with the latest you can afford - I’m personally using a M3 Pro MacBook.

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eonsim

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#3407196 25-Aug-2025 11:20

Santo93:

I am thinking a snapdragon, or M2 chip, but I am not sure how mature linux support is for them.

Snapdragon support in Linux is supposed to be not great, I'd suggest avoiding them for another year or so if you want to be purely linux based.

muppet

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#3407203 25-Aug-2025 11:31

I've got a Lenovo T480s which has Linux Mint on it - it seems to last ~1 week on Standby before it carks it, probably longer. I think it's down to about 70% battery capacity. It'll run for about 3-4 hours off battery when in use. I use it as you say, it lives in the lounge and I grab it and use it here and there, charge it every now and then. Certainly the standby isn't _great_ on it, but I know there's a few other tweaks I can do (make the wifi kernel module get removed before suspend, re-added on resume) etc to increase it, but I can't be bothered. It's OK for what I want.

I haven't bothered to figure out how to enable Hibernation on it, it's not enabled by default and requires quite a bit of pissing around to get it working.

I also have a M2 Macbook - it just lives on my desk at work though unless I'm on call. As MM says above, the battery life is bonkers. I'm always amazed at how quick it's ready to use when you open the lid too, Linux has got a lot better but this things acts like its not even been off. Of course the downsides are the price of the damn things, and gawd the UI. I've been using it for 2 years now and it still pisses me off on a regular basis. The fact you have to install a 3rd party app to get decent Window snapping, a 3rd party app is required to get a usable set of Tray icons with the rest tucked out of the way. etc etc etc. But it's so fast and with native Unix built in, I mostly forgive it.

If Jesus rocked up and said "Yo, Muppo, you can only take one of those laptops with you when you cark it" I'd take the Lenovo.

shaned

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#3407225 25-Aug-2025 12:15

I need to agree on the Mac suggestions. I'm a Linux guy since the 90s, but I couldn't find anything to compete with the performance, battery life, portability, and good screen. You pay more, but you get what you pay for.

I pretty much avoid the OSX stupid corners since I live in the terminal, VSCode, and a browser. So just full screen each and Cmd-Tab between them. Brew has most commands you'll need. Install OrbStack to get a nice Linux VM + docker + kubernetes setup, or 'brew install lima' if you want full open-source. There are plenty of browsers and terminals to pick from so you'll need to just find what you like best.

On the odd occasion I put the terminal away, CrossOver+Steam does an amazing job. It pretty much equals performance of Mac native ports of games. Of course, it's integrated graphics so you're not getting gaming-machine class FPS.

geocom

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#3407293 25-Aug-2025 13:19

Snapdragon is still very much a work in progress. The kernel is getting updates and it is getting better but you will need to be on a bleeding edge distro to get the updates.

One of the biggest issues is DTB support there is no ACPI. ACPI will find what hardware your computer has and work with it ARM/Snapdragon requires a device tree file that means every computer needs to have its own DTB as you can guess manufactures are not exactly just sending these to the Linux foundation and on top of that the system needs a process to select the correct DTB for your system at boot.

Ubuntu at the moment is the only distro I know who are actively developing see here https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdragon-x-elite/48800 instructions are there including bug tracking links for the units that are working.

There are a lot of Snapdragon PC's that are not yet supported so if your looking at going the snapdragon route check the ones that are supported or you could be stuck on windows waiting for it to be.

Fedora rewhide has a version you can get running on snapdragon but be aware there is no installer and there are some major caveats https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/snapdragon-x-elite-fedora-42-system-bring-up-and-looking-for-collaborators-or-sigs/153631

So long way of saying it works but your millage may vary and its defiantly not even close to being production ready.

In terms of sleep its still very broken on my snapdragon computer it will still use about 50% of its battery in a day just sitting in my bag.

Sound drivers are a work in progress and may damage the speakers so are disabled. So Bluetooth is the only option for audio. Video is software only support at least in Firefox so some videos wont play others like youtube play fine but wont be as efficient. Snaps seem to be best for running x86 apps(Signal for example is only x86 and will run so long as its a snap) but there is not really great emulator support built in.

I am using it as my daily laptop but would I recommend it? If you like to tinker and hack around on your system then maybe but if you want something that just works I would stay away for the moment.

ARM Macs seem to have better Linux support at the moment I cant really comment on it personally as its not what I'm running but Fedora now has an official Asahi Remix. That from what I can tell should work a whole lot better than snapdragon at this point in time. It has emulation support for x86 apps built in and has more than a few years extra development time(even if they had to reverse engineer most of it. It is a much smaller pool)

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Batman

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#3407412 25-Aug-2025 20:36

this is one of the many problems why i immediately switched to macbook the day that M1 was released. prior to that been using windows since the 80s.

michaelmurfy

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#3407429 25-Aug-2025 23:45

Batman: this is one of the many problems why i immediately switched to macbook the day that M1 was released. prior to that been using windows since the 80s.

Over the years my work Windows laptops have woken up and cooked themselves in my bag. Could never figure out why.

Until:

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#3407430 26-Aug-2025 00:26

shaned:

I need to agree on the Mac suggestions. I'm a Linux guy since the 90s, but I couldn't find anything to compete with the performance, battery life, portability, and good screen. You pay more, but you get what you pay for.

I don’t think you pay more if you buy the base spec of each model. If you increase the RAM or storage you get completely pillaged but if you try and buy a feature competitive windows laptop you are paying similar or more.

What you can’t buy easily is a crappy Inspiron class machine with a terrible screen and massive chassis flex.

huckster

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#3407431 26-Aug-2025 00:32

michaelmurfy:

Over the years my work Windows laptops have woken up and cooked themselves in my bag. Could never figure out why.

I'm old school and shut it down when I finish before putting it in the backpack. Used to boot up quite quickly until they did something weird with the corporate LAN.....

Santo93

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#3407510 26-Aug-2025 10:38

Thanks for all the answers everyone, I will see if I can tinker with my current laptop (I had not thought about unmounting the wifi driver for example during sleep), And If it still is not great I might just run MacOS for my laptop, since I often only need to use the browser or a word processor while I use my laptop (knock on wood).

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johno1234

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#3407519 26-Aug-2025 11:00

huckster:

michaelmurfy:

Over the years my work Windows laptops have woken up and cooked themselves in my bag. Could never figure out why.

I'm old school and shut it down when I finish before putting it in the backpack. Used to boot up quite quickly until they did something weird with the corporate LAN.....

Same. Windows boot used to take forever but with recent versions, SSD and fast CPUs even midrange laptops boot up in a few seconds now.

Ragnor

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#3407640 26-Aug-2025 18:39

Yes I usually change "close lid" to hibernate - avoiding the modern standby issues. Fast enough with a decent SSD.

Still crazy modern standby is still broken.

cddt

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#3407754 27-Aug-2025 07:44

I guess I've never encountered this problem because I'm old fashioned and shut down my computer (laptop or desktop) when I'm not using it.

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MurrayM

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#3407768 27-Aug-2025 09:17

I had an old Asus Eee PC running Windows 7 that I used to use as my lounge PC (mostly just used a browser to look things up while I was watching TV, a bit of online shopping, emails, etc). I decided that all I really need is something with a browser, a screen bigger than a phone, and a proper keyboard since I dislike on-screen keyboards; so I replaced my old PC with a cheapish Chromebook that has about an 8 hour battery life and can quite happily sleep for several days without losing too much charge. It charges up pretty fast too.

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