Comment by pbh101

> its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature.

The real problem is that the hardware vendors aren't using its development model. To make this work you either need a) the hardware vendor to write good drivers/firmware, or b) the hardware vendor to publish the source code or sufficient documentation so that someone else can reasonably fix their bugs.

The Linux model is the second one. Which isn't what's happening when a hardware vendor doesn't do either of them. But some of them are better than others, and it's the sort of thing you can look up before you buy something, so this is a situation where you can vote with your wallet.

A lot of this is also the direct fault of Microsoft for pressuring hardware vendors to support "Modern Standby" instead of rather than in addition to S3 suspend, presumably because they're organizationally incapable of making Windows Update work efficiently so they need Modern Standby to paper over it by having it run when the laptop is "asleep" and then they can't have people noticing that S3 is more efficient. But Microsoft's current mission to get everyone to switch to Linux appears to be in full swing now, so we'll see if their efforts on that front manage to improve the situation over time.

I should have said ‘product development’ model versus just ‘development’ to be more clear. To state another way: Linux has no way, no function, no pathway to providing this. This is not really surprising, because it isn’t the work software developers find fun and self-rewarding, but rather more the relatively mundane business-as-usual scope of product managers and business development folks.

… And that’s all fine, because this is a super niche need: effectively nobody needs Linux laptops and even fewer depend on sleep to work. If ‘Linux’ convinced itself it really really needed to solve this problem for whatever reason, it would do something that doesn’t look like its current development model, something outside that.

Regardless, the net result in the world today is that Linux sleep doesn’t work in general.

It's not the development model at fault here. It's the simple fact that Windows makes up nearly the entire user base for PCs. Companies make sure their hardware works with Windows, but many don't bother with Linux because it's such a tiny percentage of their sales.

The feature itself works. There are just hardware that is buggy and don't support it properly.

That's a vastly different statement.

> Regardless of how it must be implemented, if this is a desirable feature then this explanation isn’t an absolution of Linux but rather an indictment: its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature.

The problem is: the specifications of ACPI are complex, Windows' behavior tends to be pretty much trash and most hardware tends to be trash too (AMD GPUs for example were infamous for not being resettable for years [1]), which means that BIOSes have to work around quirks on both the hardware and software. Usually, as soon as it is reasonably working with Windows (for a varying definition of "reasonably", that is), the ACPI code is shipped and that's it.

Unfortunately, Linux follows standards (or at least, it tries to) and cannot fully emulate the numerous Windows quirks... and on top of that, GPUs tend to be hot piles of dung requiring proprietary blobs that make life even worse.

[1] https://www.nicksherlock.com/2020/11/working-around-the-amd-...