Ask Lemmy

suspend has to keep supplying power to the RAM

When I close my laptop's lid, I have it set up to suspend for five minutes, then hibernate.

That lets me close the lid and move the laptop to somewhere nearby without using much battery power, but if it gets left closed for long, the thing will hibernate, so it won't drain the battery.

That's HandleLidSwitch=suspend-then-hibernate in /etc/systemd/logind.conf, and HibernateDelaySec=300 in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf.

Any other system just gets shut down.

EDIT: Note that I don't believe that this is necessary to avoid data loss. I think that the default on Debian is to suspend, but there's another default to hibernate when the battery becomes extremely low, so either way, a laptop sitting on a shelf for a week

or however long it takes to drain whatever battery is left while suspended

should wind up hibernated. But with the defaults, it's going to have a laptop with critical battery next time you open it up, and with my settings, it'll have about as much charge as when you closed the thing.

Also, lithium batteries left in very low charge states will permanently lose capacity, and while there's a buffer built in there (i.e. 0% on your battery gauge doesn't mean that the thing is discharged to 0 volts), they'll also inexorably self-discharge a bit, and I'd just as soon keep them well away from that state. I've had devices, including laptops, that have a few minutes of battery life or won't work at all after having been left in a drawer for years.

I use suspend-then-hibernate on my laptop (arch). It has a Nvidia graphics card, so it gives problems sometimes, but it mostly works fine.

I set it up like that in case I disconnect the laptop, so it will hibernate before running out of battery; it will also hibernate after 16h of being suspended (to save power), but I usually turn it back on before that.

I like suspending because my laptop has an HDD, and it is way faster to turn it back on this way.

Always power off everything and anything i can eg , routers, TV,, switches, desktop PC etc

For my full desktop, I turn it off when I'm not using it. It basically exists to do heavy compute tasks. I basically do that a few times a week. There's no reason to leave it on if I'm not in the middle of a job. That would be true regardless of the O.S. I'm using on it.

My main computer, I suspend. Usually, I try to make sure that happens on purpose because Ubuntu has this impossible to troubleshoot behavior^1^ that seems to happen more often if it falls asleep on its own.

I would be more inclined to shut it down but I'm particular about my windows and it takes what feels like an hour to get everything just so after reboot. I can't deal with that every day. (Nor am I thrilled about how often Ubuntu LTS wants me to reboot for updates. My desktop needs Ubuntu Studio LTS but my main computer doesn't. When I get time and energy, I'm switching it to Mint so I can deal with someone else's obnoxious choices for a change without learning an entirely new distro.)

^1^ The behavior is not recovering video on wake. It does seem to be working but following the commands I have memorized to shut it down from inside a virtual terminal don't work. The only way to get it down is to hold the power button for "4 seconds" or pull the power plug.

Power Off to secure that things get updated and resetting float integers in case they would go haywire

Poweroff could use more write cycles on the SSD because it has to read everything at startup, but suspend has to keep supplying power to the RAM

for this, I would say SSD is more valuable personally, so if that was my only reason, I'd suspend to RAM every time

My computer's generally doing stuff I have it set to do, so I don't suspend to RAM

Laptop gets turned off when going outside, also encrypted

I use systemctl poweroff to power down my laptop at work since I'm not at the office thu–sun. My desktop PC at home never gets rest. 😔

If I'm putting it into a bag, I'll power it off. It (Debian Laptop) boots faster than my Android tablet anyway, and I worry about it overheating without airflow.

The rest of the time, I just lock it and leave it to make it's own power decisions. Whatever the defaults were, from install, they seem fine.

It boots so fast, I don't notice if it was suspended or a cold boot unless I happen to have an attentive moment to watch the boot sequence carefully.

After shutting down anything in use, I use suspend set for a 35-minute delay. Most evenings I listen to bed-time audio. Ubuntu hasn't been terribly reliable, works about 2/3 of the time.

My work machine (Ubuntu) gets suspended at the end of the day during the week and shut down on Friday. It's a good balance between keeping my many programs running and ready and cleaning up regularly.

I always shut down my desktop pc (Arch, btw) as it takes just a few seconds to boot up.

My laptop (Arch) I shut down because suspend never worked.

I use poweoff generally. On my laptop, the cellular card prevents sleep, and my desktop often refuses to wake from sleep.

Honestly not much fussed about it as both systems boot so quickly that it's not much of an issue.

As for SSD longevity, again not much fussed about it. In the last 20 years I've only had 1 SSD fail so far. A 40GB drive that bought in 2007ish finally failed last year.

Power off. I never used hibernation nor suspend (even on Windows) and as I don't use some of my computers for weeks, it just doesn't make sense to keep them suspended for so long. And now that I'm on Fedora Atomic Desktop with auto-updates, I would have to reboot regularly anyway in order to apply updates.

Only exception is the Steam Deck for which I kept suspend so I can pick up my games where I left off.

I'm using suspend on my desktop running Manjaro KDE. To reduce power usage it goes to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity and wakes up on mouse or keyboard input. Aside from some flaky kernel versions and after underclocking an unstable EXPO profile it's pretty stable, even games continue to run after wakeup.

I use suspend with Linux Mint on my Framework 13.

I use a laptop, so I iust put it to sleep. I only restart it when I do updates or when the system crashes. I also turn it off (when I remember to do so...) if I leave it unattended in untrustworthy environment due to encryption.

I also have a mini PC, but I only turn it on when needed, which isn't often since I haven't really figured out what to use it for. It's running Linux Mint headless, because Mint fits my laziness. I can use it via Tailscale, but I don't really know what to do with it. So far it's been mostly useful with OpenWebRX, SDR++ server which also offers compression unlike RTL_TCP as well as being able to use any SDR++ supported SDR, and I also intended to use Navidrome on it as well. My intention was to just download full albums on there, rather than picking out individual songs, but I still have the urge to put all of it on my phone.

I use suspend on my desktop every night at bed time. Running Pop. Could never be one of those with a 24/7 on desktop, too much noise.

Haven’t needed it to, I guess even after kernel updates you can log off and log back on to set the changes.

I just turn off the screens, and I have a usb switch to switch off my keyboard and mouse (a cheap usb flip switch + a small usb hub).

Reboots when needed.

No. Never let them see your next move.

Suspend, most of the time. I have a two handed Vulcan nerve pinch keybind that does that for the end of the day. A desktop PC doesn't have a lid, but that keybind is about as cathartic as closing a laptop.

This is actually different from how I have the desktop environment set to do it, which is the hybrid suspend/hibernate option. This gives me at least a couple of options without too much messing around. Quick shutdown: Use keyboard; Hybrid: Use GUI (which can be done by keyboard navigation too if absolutely necessary.)

The reason? There's a surprising amount of state, such as open windows, browsers, etc. that need to be set back up if coming back cold from a full power off and that bothers me more than maybe it should.

By rights, I should use the hybrid option all the time as it's technically safer, but it takes longer to power off and it actually suspends then unsuspends for a few seconds as it sets up the hibernation profile, which gives me the willies.

Also, the power grid is pretty stable here. If I was elsewhere I might be using the hybrid a lot more.

I use echo o | sudo tee /proc/sysrq-trigger

sudo halt && shutdown

If I'm shutting down it's only because there is a problem causing a lockup

I close the lid. Ubuntu 24.04, fedora 41 and Arch. All gnome.