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Comment by calpaterson | Hacker News Reader

I use Debian on desktop and laptop all day every day and have not had a problem with suspend and resume in at least the last 5 years. At this point, it seems to work at least as well as Windows and Mac (perhaps better - I've seen a few Windows users having suspend problems).

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I recommend every person who buy a hardware for GNU/Linux to buy one that runs well out of the box with Debian main.

It is a hard requirement I suggest to my friends. May be they run Ubuntu/Fedora, but if it runs well with Debian or linux-libre, rest assured, it should work with any Distribution.

I haven't yet seen much Laptops of notebooks to recommend though. https://h-node.org/ seems to be the only good reference.

I have Debian Stretch running on a 3rd gen Thinkpad X1, and had some problems. It took about a year for suspend/resume to work reliably, before I had random lock-ups on resume. It turned out to be a bug in the early MMU code, and once it was fixed I had a very stable experience. This bug was hard to reproduce: on other Thinkpads in my company nobody had the issue, but with a slightly different environment (TP models, Ubuntu not Debian and different kernel versions).

More recently I had a regression for a few months, until the issue was identified (and fixed).

Both experiences made me more sensitive to Linux stability issues. If you look for it, you will find many bug reports. They typically are rather frustrating: they happen for some unlucky guy, but are hard or impossible to reproduce in slightly different contexts. I guess this can't really be avoided: both Linux and a modern PC are complex systems, and there are many variants. And no ODM doing integration tests (or not with your preferred distro of PC configuration). So some glitches are bound to happen. Considering the lack of ODM support and standardization, the situation is actually quite good. But there are bound to be glitches here and there. For those who want to avoid it, it's possible to avoid all this by getting a PC with Linux pre-installed, or with some integration test done (it seems to me there's some work done by Canonical for Ubuntu on some Thinkpad models, but not sure...). Also, not jumping on brand new laptop models can help too.

As for me, I prefer to stick with Debian on my laptop of choice, and handle the rare odd glitch when it happens. It's ok. Still, when I'll buy my next laptop I'll wait for the new generation to arrive, and buy the previous one. Cheaper, more stable with Linux, and not much hardware differences anyway nowadays.

Dell officially supports Ubuntu and sells laptops with it on their store.

I've not had any issues with my XPS 13 on it.

> Dell officially supports Ubuntu...

Meh. I'm writing this from an Asus EeePC which was once officially supported by Ubuntu, but now with broken graphics and wifi.

The non-free graphics driver is not included in Ubuntu anymore and the wifi works only with non-free binary blob.

Also, I recently found that wifi doesn't support channel 13 and 14 (found it accidentally when my laptop wasn't seeing the nearby hotspot) with the non-free blob. Now I run Debian testing.

Don't trust in those "Officially supported" things, unless it's Debian GNU/Linux. Otherwise, it's eventually going to be broken.

All the current wifi chipsets require binary blobs. They are considered part of the hardware, they are running on the hardware, not on your cpu, they just aren't shipped on an EPROM, but the driver is loading it at init time.

The channel visibility is regulatory thing; if you see only channels 1-12 you have set it for North America, most of the world can use 1-13, and Japan also 14 (for 802.11b only).

Well the GPU is Intel who only make an open source driver. And the Wifi driver works out of the box.

The world has changed from the times of the EeePC.

Wifi comes up ?

VPN reconnects ?

USB's and Card readers stay mounted ?

Audio mixer volume stays the same ?

Youtube videos and music player resumes ?

uptime shows the correct information ?

All of this out of the box in 2015 ? That must have been the year of linux on the desktop.

Yes all of it. I'm on a thinkpad T450, running Debian oldstable (jessie) which was frozen for release in late 2014.

Suspend-to-disk too?

I don't really do that much so I don't know. It only really happens in laptops when battery is running low while suspended and then something seems to wake the laptop and then hibernate it. Cool trick. No idea how it works though.

Does anyone really use suspend-to-disk? It takes awfully long to write 8-16 GB of data, then awfully long to read it back. It is much faster to just boot, than to restore from suspend to disk.

If the battery level is at the end the OS should suspend to disk in order to avoid losing work.

Hybrid-suspend should help avoid read it back from disk if AC or battery power is uninterrupted. Also I find caches dropping benefitting to reduce the suspend time.

Yes, that is my experience too on Linux. However, most times it isn’t actually necessary to write the full RAM out and IIRC Windows and macOS actually don’t. There are a few approaches that work, e.g. you can do memory ballooning and drop caches to reduce memory usage before suspending. In addition, you can write unused RAM pages to disk during normal operation, so that when the user wants to suspend, most of the pages are already on disk.

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