State of S3 – Your Laptop is no Laptop anymore – a personal Rant

I wouldn‘t call the always–on feature stupid but deliberate. The purpose of modern Windows being an ad surface and capture device for learning everything the user knows from user interaction. Switching off Windows Updates, even on Windows Pro and Windows 10, is practically impossible, short of isolating it from net access.

Apple does this during sleep when connected to power, so maybe Microsoft thought it needs that as well?

Windows updates take 5 minutes max on any semi-recent CPU and NVMe SSD.

The major H1/H2 releases take a bit longer, up to 15 minutes. But not stuck at 100%.

Yeah but nobody calls Torvalds about national security if he doesn't push out an upgrade pack, but the same cannot be said about windows.

> receive Windows Updates during Sleep mode

That is just peak level stupidity.

It also violates the core idea of sleep mode: Keep the current state of my computer intact until I continue working. If a windows update forces a reboot, then that computer state will be lost.

if it would work correctly it's acctually a grate UX boon for the user

basically you don't block any bandwidth while a user is using the computer and instead when they are not

also you download slower (less bandwidth) in the background because you have much more time available to download it (like e.g. the whole night)

this feature is also only about downloads, that windows tends to force apply updates once they are downloaded is a different unrelated issue altogether

so theoretically especially for laptops which are only used idk. 1-2h max a day for people with not so fast internet this could be grate

could because it isn't, due to implementation details

e.g. you would only want to run this if you are: plugged in (power), the internet is reliable (at least as reliable as "normally" for any given network) etc.

but AFIK it doesn't really detect changes in power status, doesn't detect bad natwork conditions (which can lead to increased power use), and probably doesn't use "intentional slow" download either

you also can't opt out

so yeah it seems shit with how it's implemented -- but the idea by itself isn't bad

Its even worse if you have a bitlocker config that requires a pin. It will reboot during the update but then fail the boot because noone entered the pin in time, leaving you to complete the update actively when you open it back up. Ironically this happens even if you select "update and shutdown" because the restart happens during the update process.

One wonders how many giga-watts of electricity Windows update consumes each year?

Device manufacturers just want windows to run. And why wouldn't they? They sell the devices with windows. If windows doesn't use S3 then S3 never gets tested, whether it's present or not. So it doesn't work, whether it's present or not, and you can't use it, whether it's present or not.

Modern standby has existed for longer than ACPI did when modern standby was introduced.

Yes I know ACPI was ratified in 1996 but it didn't ACTUALLY exist until 1998 and I would argue it wasn't actually implemented until early 2000 for enterprise users and 2001 for consumers.

Every single criticism, every single one, levied at modern standby was also made against pre-modern standby ACPI.

In addition to that, tech luminaries too numerous to count ranted for years and years and years that ACPI was a secret evil plot by the NSA to I don't know, kidnap your dog or something. That's not an exaggeration. That actually happened 20+ years ago.

Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.

Linus Torvalds, 2003. https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7279 He's talking here about pre-modern standby ACPI, the standard everyone loves and misses today and writes long articles eulogizing.

I'm going to chalk this up to people hating change for the sake of hating change.

edit: I'm actually gonna chalk this up to hating for the sake of hating. I know, you know, and I know that you know that if old-skool BIOS was the standard, Hacker News would be flooded with 10,000 word Medium articles about how the evil tech companies are conspiring to keep our systems insecure so the NSA can kidnap our dogs and if pre-Modern Standby was the standard there'd be stories hating on that too.

It's like how haxxors reminisce about the days when the CPU bus was exposed on a port or card-edge connector out the back of a machine and everything was "so free and open" but when a modern interface with 1/10,000,000,000th the number of vulnerabilities is introduced those same people hate on it.

I learned about this workaround a while back on some throwaway comment on a youtube video, and from what I can tell it really works. I never bothered to really look into system logs or whatever to verify what was going on.

But in a nutshell, unplug your laptop before you close the lid. Windows does not suspend to modern standby when that happens. I always had an overcooked and dead laptop at the other end of my commute, which went away when I started unplugging first. Now my windows machine can go literal days in sleep mode without really impacting remaining battery that much.

How do you hibernate with zram file? Is a seperate swap partition necessary for hibernating?

Even if I create 200% swap file, I get `Call to Hibernate failed: Not enough suitable swap space for hibernation available on compatible block devices and file systems` on fedora 40.

It's on device manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo for dropping S3 from UEFI in favor of it.

Note that even CPU manufacturers no longer provide firmware development support for making S3 work on recent series of CPUs. (Apparently some get an exception, as I’ve heard of some laptops from large brands that are sold with Linux and do have S3 support in the firmware.)

To be fair this is not on microsoft for inventing S0, or even pushing for it for windows devices. It's on device manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo for dropping S3 from UEFI in favor of it.

It's like they don't even use their products

Oh who am I kidding, if they used they would notice all the bloatware on it and the shoddy build quality, etc

This is one the primary reasons I use a MacBook (the other being the trackpad). Instant and reliable on/off when I close/open the lid, without ever worrying about it is something I just take for granted.

If I need a mouse and do a controlled shutdown/boot I might as well use a desktop.

I used to be able to just close the lid on my laptop and forget about it for days. Nowadays with the new laptop provided by my employer, if I close the lid wrong, it doesn't even go to sleep and the battery drains completely (which is... understandable, I guess, since it didn't go to sleep) but even if I do all the rituals and it goes to sleep, the battery still drains away within a few hours. I can't full charge my laptop at the end of the workday, keep my VS and stuff open, and just the laptop to sleep. I have to shut it down properly and then start everything back up again the next morning.

Pretty anoying when you have more than 64G of memory though.

I have had this exact problem on many of my previous Macbooks (2009, 2015, 2019). I'm hoping my newest Apple Silicon one will solve it.

edit: maybe not the specific S3 sleep problem but a general inability to sleep correctly

It's not unusual for my laptop to have hundreds of days of uptime.

This isn’t something to be proud of. It means that you’re not applying the regularly-released security updates.

macOS is spectacularly good at restoring state on reboot. It’s like it never happened.

Update your software.

The steam deck? Mine is terrible at this, I have to shut it down cause otherwise it just dies. Battery holds up just fine when playing games though.

Good you do not hold a company-controlled macbook where they force you (after annoying you to death) to do OS upgrades that may break software they themselves provide and require you to use. And then tell you to wait the next of apple's update or some fix because there is nothing they can do. At least windows updates usually do not break software. Unless something gets corrupted or wrong on the way and it does not boot to the OS at all, in which case good luck.

Note that security updates are independent of the OS updates (or should be). There is no real excuse of forcing a user upgrade an OS version.

Otherwise under personal use/control macbooks are great, though, in not forcing you do updates of annoy you to death about them.

That's interesting as my post just describes the exact opposite. I love to shut my PC down. It gives me a feel of "I am done. It's okay to stop now"

I have to restart my MacBook every few days unfortunately because sometimes it just has weird issues (like usb devices or networking stopping working).

MacBooks aren't immune to sleep issues either though. Mine used to forget the external display about a fifth of the time, and forget it has any display at all once every 20 or 30 lid close->open cycle.

The solution happened to be unplug and replug for the first issue, and force reboot for the second. I've enough people having issues with external displays that I don't think it's an isolated problem.

For comparison a Surface Pro failing to go to sleep or getting hot in the bag hasn't happened to me in 2 years of owning these machines. It might surely happen, but it's far from a regular occurrence I think.

I only use mine occasionally, so I turn it off an put in a drawer. When I power it on a few months later the battery is flat, and the machines date in far in the past.

This have never happened with any other laptop I've had.

But… macbooks have a habit of waking for a few seconds while they're supposed to be asleep.

I got woken up in the night a couple of times because of my macbook doing that.

The issue is not for one person or company to fix. Just like it's impossible to convince all the OSS desktop folks to follow one displayserver/toolkit/UX paradigm it's equally impossible to enforce bug free hardware and drivers from all the PC hardware manufacturers and whatever Microsoft is doing at the moment it seems fixing this is very low on the priority list...

Is it running Windows? I've found that on Linux this specific issue doesn't happen, it will turn off the fans, and they will stay off. But the battery is still drained, even though, on average, I tend to get better battery life than with Windows on the same machine.

But Windows tends to wake it up randomly and do God knows what, since the PC will actually be hot to the touch.

Bonus points for attempting to install updates, then reboot, only to end up stuck waiting for the BitLocker PIN.

If your notebook has 16 GB of RAM that needs to be written out every time it hibernates, and you do that three times a day, five days a week, you’d accumulate about 63 TB of writes over five years. That’s roughly a third of the TBW rating for an average 256 GB SSD. A typical 1 TB SSD would have three times the endurance or more.

I think your SSD will handle it just fine. :)

Which will shorten the lifespan of the SSD

Technically true, but not enough for you to notice.

Modern SSDs have drive write lifetimes in the high hundreds of TB of writes.

If you had 128GB of memory in your laptop, writing that down to disk isn't going to consume much of that write lifetime.

I think Windows will shorten the lifespan of your SSD even if you use "shut down", at least if you don't disable "fast startup". "Fast startup" basically replaces "shut down" with a light form of hiberation, which makes shutting the machine down take a long while and turning it on about a second faster. Not worth the tradeoff in my opinion. I also got some bugs when using fast startup, sometimes the sound wouldn't work until a reboot or my WiFi took weirdly long to connect. This is on a Lenovo Yoga/IdeaPad.

You can reenable S3 support on many thinkpads, it's in the bios they call it "Linux sleep".

Unfortunately a lot of Laptop manufacturers were forced to leave the fans on all the time due to overheating which would cause battery issues if they didn't run the fans.

I remember getting a BIOS update on my Dell a few years ago that permanently turned the fan on too.

Modern Standby enables much faster return from Standby. You open the lid of your device and it's there. That's not the case with S3. I find it adds a lot of convenience.

Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere?

Why is this important, or even something to consider? The only thing that's important with Windows and features in it is whether something delivers value to Microsoft.

Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere?

Why do you think it was created to deliver value to the customer?

It is merely a reason for Microsoft to spy^Hextract value from a customer even when the PC is sleeping. Like humans, laptop spend a third of their life in sleep mode and it would be nice to monetise that time, multiplied by a couple billion users.

I think it is clear that the goal of the Windows division is to milk every user for all their worth. By the time they are done, laptops will be an obsolete product and Microsoft doesn't really want to support Windows 20 more years.

Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere?

I guess the value is for enterprise users because the ecosystem is so bad.

When I return from sleep on my laptop, my VPN is disconnected and can't reconnect itself automatically as I need to go through the auth + 2FA phase. I am also logged of all Azure AD authenticated web apps and Microsoft web apps like Teams and Outlook are so bad they don't automatically sign in back when you have signed on on other Azure AD resources.

I haven't started my corporate laptop on the original windows 10 for years so I can't compare but I imagine a "modern standby" would have some keepalive on the VPN connections and apps like teams so they don't sign you out?

But in the end this is kind of useless on those Dell laptops because it drains the battery so fast and they have such a low battery life that you just want to shut them down if they are not connected to their docking statino. I guess it serves the people who are on-prem and close the lid to go from one meeting room to another.

But when I was working on-prem I would just configure it to just lock the laptop and would use the sleep shortcut to put the laptop to a normal sleep. Apparently most people were too dumb to figure that out and would walk between their desk and the meeting room awkwardly with the lid up, I can't believe they have managers roles or are even allowed to work in the IT industry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Perhaps this was designed for Outlook, but I think the use case is dubious.

Oh, sweet summer child. I sometimes use Windows on my work machine, complete with the "new" Teams and "new" Outlook. For some reason, these need a while to update when I wake my machine from sleep, even though it usually sleeps connected to power, with a network cord plugged in and in range of Wi-Fi. Teams, in particular, will say it's offline for a few minutes, even though I can browse the web as soon as the box actually becomes interactive.

The computer actually does something while asleep, judging by how hot it gets. But, as you say, it's really not clear what. It will do this even though Defender is deactivated (we have some other handbrake at work which doesn't do a full system scan on its own) and the system is fully up-to-date.

I guess this was pitched by some product person as the feature that brings the laptop on and connects to wifi instantly when you open the lid. All the other uses are post facto justifications. This was all dreamt up when Apple was still on x86. Obviously, now that Apple has superior battery life, these gimmicks don't make any sense.

IME experience, at least on HP G8 EliteBooks, both AMD and Intel, Linux actually keeps the machine quiet and cool during "modern standby". With Windows, it absolutely will turn on the fans at some point, and the machine absolutely will get hot for whatever reason.

This seems to have been fixed for a while now (say a year or so), but when the Intel machine was new, Windows would sometimes not wake up from sleep, or if did, the screen would be garbled.

The AMD still has an issue where Windows will "unexpectedly shutdown" (according to the event log) during modern standby. This happens every single time I leave it on standby during the night. This is an almost four-year-old machine by now, not some brand-spanking-new thing, which works otherwise perfectly, especially on Linux.

I’m curious how well Asahi linux works with standby on a Apple Silicon Mac.

I’ve not tried it long but from my short experience, it works well.

Btw, Asahi is actually really easy to install if you are curious. Everything is done/installed from macOS including shrinking your macOS partition. And uninstalling it is as simple as removing the partition from Disk Manager and growing back your macOS partition.

All you need is some disk space and, one command line to copy paste and about 20 minutes.

And it works really well overall. It have everything to be a daily driver (including graphics acceleration) except external display support and TouchID. But both of those issues are being worked on.

From personal experience, it's still safe to never shut down an apple laptop, just throw it in the backpack/suitcase and it will be cool and with the same battery at the destination.

Tbh all my Apple laptops, including the piece of shit one with the emoji keyboard, have had no problem sleeping.

Ofc that's on mac os, not sure what they offer if you install linux or windows.

There’s something breathtakingly arrogant about that

"Breathtakingly arrogant" is pretty much exactly what I would think of if someone asked me to describe Microsoft in 2 words.

Words matter in this case.

The fact that they are pushing S3 as "Linux Sleep" or "Legacy Sleep" and S0ix as "modern sleep" is absolutely not innocent from a marketing perspective.

We ought to reverse Uno this non-sense. Perhaps the Linux Foundation and all the distro development teams out there should start calling S3 _True_Sleep_™ in all their official communication.

After hibernating or shutting down my laptop, I need to enter the password for the disk encryption again. It's a long, secure password, and I hate entering it. Now that my new laptop does not support S3 anymore and the battery does not last one night in S0ix, I have to enter it every morning, and I constantly mistype because I don't see what I'm typing. I'm considering changing it to something less secure because of this. TPM without PIN is not allowed by my employer, and TMP with PIN is not supported on Linux AFAIK.

1) It saves power

Shutting down and booting are intensive operations, it's likely that for short enough periods of time, sleep is actually more power-efficient if it works well.

I don't have numbers though and with SDDs and fast boot times, maybe booting is way less power hungry than before in the end.

Can't argue with 2) of course.

The main pushback we get is from our floor planners who work offsite in customer's homes - that extra 2 minutes or so while it boots from scratch apparently seems like an eternity when you're in a dirty and hazardous environment.

#2 I have a Python script to close all my open windows.

2, I shutdown my personal laptop because I don't care having a blankslate when booting up.

But regarding the work laptop, Sometimes it's nice to have stuff ready when you're oncall. I have my applications/windows pre-prepared so that I don't have to go trough a thousands hoops in the middle of the night to resolved that priority 1 incident.

I understand your point, but I also can see what's the fuzz about. If the fuzz is legit is not for me to say.

Why do we accept being spat upon and treated like basement bums when we put our money on the table???

Tell me you aren't in the target market without telling me you aren't in the target market.

Microsoft will never, ever, ever be able to make everyone happy. I do not agree with the direction they are going either, because I (as a long-time developer on Windows) am not in their target market.

Why do we accept being spat upon and treated like basement bums when we put our money on the table???

People put their money on the table when they purchase MacBooks.

Thing is.... My gigantic desktop computer has thermal cutoffs, it will shut down if the CPU gets too hot. I remember desktop PCs having that for ages. I've had overheating laptops do the same. Are laptop manufacturers just getting lazy and skimping on failsafe hardware temperature cut-offs!?? Like, as a hardware manufacturer I would always add that factor-of-5 "the software side WILL fuck up" safety measures. How is the HARDWARE allowing software to let it melt itself in this day and age!?

Hibernate mode takes a long time to enter and exit, as it involves writing a lot of data to disk and then reading it back upon resuming. The whole point of Sleep mode is that it's fast: you just close the lid and you're in sleep mode, saving power. Then if you want to check something quickly, or resume your work, you just open the lid and in a few seconds or less, your computer is fully operational again.

I agree, the term "S3 Sleep" would be better, I think it would be understood by many in the audience of HN.

Me too - to those using acronyms and other abbreviations in their writing, even "obvious ones": it is a good practice to introduce what each stands for the first time it gets used.

  ACL = Access Control List / Association for Computational Linguistics
  AAA = Authentication Authorization, Accounting / American Automobile Association / Triple-A Battery Size
  ...
  S3  = AWS Simple Storage Service / ACPI Sleep States: S3 is one of them, they range from S0 - S5) / Suspend-to-Idle (S0ix) "Windows 10" mode selected in system firmware, "s2idle" selected in /sys/power/mem_sleep, and Suspend-to-RAM (S3)

Same! It's unfortunate that the names collide. I was also totally confused.

From the article,

Traditional Sleep requires all system hardware and software components to work together. The operating system must support Sleep, as well as the hardware (e.g. CPU) and the BIOS/UEFI. According to the UEFI to Hardware Interface Standard (ACPI), this usual form of sleep is referred to as S3. S3 is a Sleep State in which all system components, except for the RAM and CPU Cache, are powered off.

I get where you are coming from, but from a user's perspective I really struggle to see the benefits of S0ix.

More parts are kept on, for the sake of updates and notifications. Notifications that you will get on your phone anyway (and that the laptop won't be able to get if it's not connected to a wifi anyway), and updates that will likely cause too much excess heat to be safe to perform inside of a bag.

If you see the benefits more clearly, perhaps you could elaborate on what they are?

So tell me how to tell Windows to stop using modern standby. I've never seen any benefit to it, but I do see Windows misusing it all the time and I see my battery life be wasted due to S0ix. What the fuck is the point of sleep if it's just going to keep wasting my battery life by doing shit I don't need it to do. I want a sleep mode that works as advertised, not "I'll turn the screen off but do whatever the fuck I want when you're not looking".

This is hearsay, but I remember reading complaints about S0ix and sleep (or lack thereof) in Framework laptops, which is the reason I didn't buy one.

Even then, there were rumors that Apple was going to cripple non-Apple brand chargers.

They tried, but the EU shut that down real quick and forced them to use the actual standard.

Apple: We're gonna only offer thunderbolt on all of our devices, so you can always rely on our super special premium connection!

EU: Ahem.

Apple: We're gonna only offer USB-C for great interoperability with competitors' systems, aren't we generous and great? Also this was our idea this whole time, stop asking questions!

...it does exactly what 99.99999% of the population expects it to do...

Nope, it does not, but Apple is miles ahead of MS in this implementation, so it works almost as intended (not really sleeping while not preheating your lunch in your backpack).

And now the homebrewers ruin appliances too with low quality IoT garbage.

MacBook or hibernation, pretty much...

I got a Yoga Pro 7 in the mail, I really hope Linux sleep is still around.

They surely weren't forced to create laptops with no other ports than USB-C

It's gotten better but it's very dependent on chipsets and driver support for those. I have one Samsung laptop with an Intel chipset that more or less goes standby reliably. Sometimes it still messes up and it's dead when you open it. But mostly it's fine and it's gotten more rare with recent kernel versions. The fingerprint reader is pretty much the only thing that doesn't work on that laptop and probably never will because it's a cheap Chinese thing with some proprietary firmware.

The core issue is that the firmware in most laptops is just ancient garbage and nobody seems to really care about it. Apple has full ownership over their own firmware so it's less of an issue for them (though it still has issues). But most chip manufacturers servicing the wintel laptop market treat software as an afterthought. They aren't very good at it and they just put in the minimum effort that they can get away with. So, it's all proprietary, poorly designed, decades old, etc. If it breaks they bang on it until it sort of works again (windows only).

Laptop makers then make things worse by just buying a lot of cheap components. Synaptic seems popular for touch pads, for example. My Samsung has one. It's not good. I've actually never come across anything made by them that wasn't garbage.

With Linux slowly creeping up in market share on desktops, it's something that could start changing. Most Linux users are very selective in what they buy and there are certain brands that are just so hopeless that people actively avoid them. Lenovo bought a good reputation from IBM when they acquired their laptop division. That's ages ago but they sort of nurtured that and it's probably helped a lot. It's not rocket science to just make sure things work on Linux.

My work laptop is a macbook. The hardware is just miles ahead of the competition. It's just not even close. Everything else is a major downgrade. I bought that Samsung to replace a mac because I was waiting for the M1 to come out when my old laptop died. I worked on that thing for half a year. Going back to a mac was just such major upgrade in every way possible. You forget how great they are. Software wise I'm actually fine with Linux. Everything I use is open source or available for Linux. I don't use any of the Apple software (the i* stuff). I'm there for the hardware only. If Linux support catches up, I might switch actually.

Or get a Macbook Air. Got the M1 in a few minutes in John Lewis and still good. No sleep problems, no fan to whirr.

The previous Macbook Air 11 also was great for sleep/wake. The Windows 7 Thinkpad before that was ok but took like 30 seconds to restart from sleep and would crash sometimes.

I think every Dell Precision 5550 in our company died from thermal issues within a year. All cooked. At least yours was trying to stay cool!

If you choose Restart in Windows then it avoids Fast Boot and actually restarts.

Me too, had to flip to Reader Mode.

There are laptops that are sold with Linux preinstalled as an option. They do support sleep correctly.

In particular, sleep worked for me on T series Thinkpads: T420, T450, T490, my current T14.

Not up to the manufacturer any more. Windows does what Windows wants. If Windows doesn't use S3 then it never gets tested, and what isn't tested is broken. On the negatives of S0ix (your battery running out), all laptops will have this same flaw because it's a Microsoft-induced flaw.