While this is definitely true, we have to acknowledge Windows has some unique challenges in this space. Sleep pretty much never works correctly on Windows laptops. For me, suspend does. In addition, Windows does have background processes doing god knows what. It's not uncommon to have some slowdown, open up Task Manager and seeing some process I-don't-know-what-it-does pinned at 99% CPU usage.
> Sleep pretty much never works correctly on Windows laptops
Sleep has worked pretty much fine on the vast majority of the Windows computers I've owned/managed, outside of a few troublesome devices such as this Legion Go and some network cards that would wake on any activity.
Meanwhile about half of my Linux machines over the years routinely fail to wake from sleep. Even today I still get issues on a modern-ish Thinkpad that fails to resume from time to time but which slept perfectly fine in Windows 10 and Windows 11 every time.
> It's not uncommon to have some slowdown, open up Task Manager and seeing some process I-don't-know-what-it-does pinned at 99% CPU usage
Yes, and I'm sure if an average user used ps aux on Linux they'd know what everything in that list is doing.
> Sleep has worked pretty much fine on the vast majority of the Windows computers I've owned/managed
Good for you, and I believe you. However you're the only person I've ever met with this sentiment. IME even multi-thousand dollar Windows laptops do not sleep right.
Luckily, it kind of works out. Windows rots if it's left un-rebooted for a few days so forcing reboots with broken sleep almost optimizes the Windows experience.
> Yes, and I'm sure if an average user used ps aux on Linux they'd know what everything in that list is doing.
Fair, but they also don't need to. I never, ever have this problem on Linux. We do have background processes but they seem to be written by people who are, I'm assuming, not asleep. They work fine. Even file indexers like baloo work correctly. I can find any file on my computer on the order of milliseconds, and I never have high CPU usage. I'm being a bit cheeky here - it's very easy to hate on Windows search so I shouldn't be bragging about functional search.
There was that one Windows handheld recently that released a SteamOS version, but I can't remember the name. Anyway sleep works correctly on the SteamOS version, though that's mostly valve's work with properly suspending games. Oh and it gets an extra hour or so of battery. But the tradeoff is... wait... 10% extra performance in games? Through the translation layer? Wow, that's shocking.
Point being, Windows on battery-enabled devices is truly ass. The bottom of the barrel of experiences. It becomes evident when you try out other devices. I have a switch. I press the power button and it turns off. It turns back on instantly. The power doesn't drain. And, my game is right back where I left it. I didn't restore from a save. I'm not on the main menu. It literally suspended the entire state of the game and un-suspended it like nothing happened. That's unthinkable on Windows.
I would never, ever put my Windows laptop to sleep with an unsaved Excel sheet open. If it wakes up, there's a good chance that application is mysteriously restarted. I don't trust anything on Windows.
> There was that one Windows handheld recently that released a SteamOS version
It is the device I mentioned earlier. The same device I suggested wasn't sleeping right. And now sleeps fine for me, now that I've disabled that device from waking the machine.
> I never, ever have this problem on Linux
Good for you, and I believe you. I've experienced runaway processes many, many times on Linux systems. Its great when the desktop session gets completely locked up so I have to hop on a different tty to go kill something because the machine is just too overloaded.
> Oh and it gets an extra hour or so of battery. But the tradeoff is... wait... 10% extra performance in games?
Once again, I'd point to crappy drivers. Lenovo has been really slow to actually push graphics drivers on their devices. And Lenovo's tools for managing power profiles is pretty bad, if the reviewer wasn't manually changing between power profiles that could easily have explained those big battery life deltas. And once again that's a Lenovo thing, they really push managing the power profiles in their Legion app instead of using any kind of good profiles in Windows itself. I play pretty similar games to those games he reviewed with big battery life deltas, and I get roughly the same battery life as he did running SteamOS.
> The bottom of the barrel of experiences
I constantly get sleep issues on my Linux hardware where it just fails to resume and sits at a black screen or throws kernel panics. I've got coworkers whose external displays don't get reconnected right from sleep. These are pretty bottom of the barrel experiences. Meanwhile, every one of my Windows machines sleeps and wakes without any issues.
> I constantly get sleep issues on my Linux hardware where it just fails to resume and sits at a black screen or throws kernel panics. I've got coworkers whose external displays don't get reconnected right from sleep. These are pretty bottom of the barrel experiences. Meanwhile, every one of my Windows machines sleeps and wakes without any issues.
Again, I believe you, but I've never seen this and I don't know anyone else who has ever seen this. Everyone I've ever talked to, ever, has said sleep on Windows does not work. That's a big reason they're on Macs.
Now, I don't like MacOS. So I use a Lunar Lake laptop with Linux, and sleep works. I have 2 1440p 240hz monitors connected over thunderbolt and those sleep and wake just fine too. Which, as an aside, is a testament to the hardware. Shoutout Intel.
And on the topic of drivers, yeah that's just a roundabout way of critiquing Windows. Those should be included in the kernel. It was a design choice to not do that, which really holds Windows back. Microsoft has been reversing course over the past 10 years or so, so we have precision drivers from Microsoft for touchpads for instance.
And, surprise surprise, those touchpads with first-party precision drivers built into Windows are the best touchpads.
As for monitors not being attached after sleep, I was mostly talking about macOS but I do get my comment isn't clear on that. It's an incredibly common issue.
As for drivers being in the kernel or outside the kernel, in the end if the vendor writes trash drivers they'll be trash drivers regardless of where they are. Clearly good touchpad drivers could have been written, but Synaptics just never gave a shit. But those same shitty touchpads were still often shitty even in Linux with open-source drivers. And what do you know, a vendor actually cares to make a good driver and things are better. We didn't even need to change the entire driver model for it to happen.
Back when I used nvidia graphics adapters a driver crash in Windows just meant maybe your app crashed, maybe it handled it gracefully and all that happened was the screen went black for a second. A driver issue on that same nvidia GPU in Linux means a kernel panic and the whole machine crashes, even things not running GPU workloads.
There are pros and cons each way about whether you bundle in the drivers into the kernel or have them live outside. Having it live in the kernel means if the vendor never bothers maintaining or opensourcing the driver you're just stuck on the old kernel. I've got a drawer full of computers which will never see a modern kernel and still keep all their functionality. A pile of e-waste because of the requirement to use that specific kernel the device shipped with, nothing else.
I just did a trial after the changes I made to my Legion Go running Windows the other day. Woke the system from sleep on my desk after a day, dropped a couple percent of battery. Started a game, played for half an hour. Pressed the power button to sleep, set it down for a few hours. Picked it back up and pressed the power button. PIN on the lock screen, and I'm back in the game as if nothing happened. Didn't lose 1% while sleeping during that break.
EDIT: Put it to sleep to write the comment, picked it up 20 minutes later, woke straight to the game without dropping a beat again.
> I would never, ever put my Windows laptop to sleep with an unsaved Excel sheet open. If it wakes up, there's a good chance that application is mysteriously restarted. I don't trust anything on Windows.
I would never, ever put any Linux laptop I've owned regardless of distro to sleep with any unsaved work at all. There's a good chance it just won't wake up at all, much less have some app restarted. I wouldn't say I don't trust anything on Linux, but generally not waking from sleep.
The Switch is a purpose-built device and is excellent at sleeping, I agree. SteamOS seems to be pretty good at it as well, but it's also hyper optimized with a massive tech company focusing on an extremely limited set of hardware which happens to include the Legion Go at the moment. We'll see if other systems work as smooth once it starts supporting more hardware. It's good there's more competition out there and it's great SteamOS is as great as it is.
But honestly I don't have any problems gaming on a Windows handheld especially after fixing this sleep driver issue on this specific device. I do agree it's clunkier than it needs to be in many ways and I hope Microsoft makes improvements like what they're talking about with that Xbox focused gaming handheld.
