Sleep and hibernate: Works on every Lenovo I've used.
Battery: My most recent laptop gets around 8-9 hours with a new battery on a normal workload, and when it drops to 3 hours, I buy a new battery.
Even my old trusty XPS 13 started not to go to sleep 1 out of 10 times. There must have been a serious regression in the kernel, but no one seems to care.
For this reason alone, I started to seriously consider giving up Linux on the desktop.
When a GRUB update destroyed my dual-boot setup and made my system completely unrecoverable, I ditched Linux and never looked back. Using OpenOffice or LibreOffice was also more akin to self-punishment usually seen in medieval monks.
As a student, all these problems were okay, but nowadays I don't have the time to constantly fight against my own OS to finally figure out that I have to adjust my fan speed rotation coefficient to make the third party WiFi driver work.
If the feature used to work reliably in older kernels, you could try and bisect the issue. There's a bit of work involved, but it's quite doable.
Not true. My Thinkpad E485 from late 2018 has either a Broadcom or a Qualcomm chip, but definitely not Intel. It works like a charm though. The bigger issue is the Realtek Ethernet NIC which has an annoying driver bug where it does not detect the carrier except when the cable is already inserted at boot time. Never buy Realtek if you can avoid it.
But if you're a regular laptop user the bigger issue is trackpad feel, if you're used to Apple devices or the new Windows drivers for trackpads, it's not acceptable. You're better off switching the way you work to using a window manager and shortcuts, like most hardcore linux users do at some point.
Overall, the quality doesn't compare to my 2013 macbook air, but it does have some newer features which're nice.
For wifi, anything with intel wifi will work fine. Atheros and Killer generally work fine as well. Basically, just stay away from Broadcomm and Realtek.
For battery, ymmv. the 2 most recent laptops I've used with linux (a dell xps 13 and a system76 darter pro) get decent battery life (8-10 on the dell, 5-8 on the system76). On the dell, the battery life wasn't much different than windows 10 on the same machine.
For sleep, this usually works fine, but can be broken on certain hardware. On the dell laptop sleep worked, but there was an annoying issue where sometimes upon resume the cpu would get stuck at the lowest frequency.
On the system76, I initially had an issue with a 10-20 second delay resuming from sleep but that was fixed with a firmware update. Presently, sleep/resume works without issue 100% of the time for me on that machine
Even if it does install and seem to work well at first, a non-supported device can break the OS install any time due to some driver / firmware change etc., and you'd have no one to blame but yourself — no promise was ever made by Dell or Linux that this particular device+OS would work.
It's just not what you should do in a business / work setting. We use supported devices — for Ubuntu, for RHEL, for ZFS, for pfSense, for VMware or Xen or HyperV, etc. — because we need someone to call when things don't work, and we need to be sure they just won't fail or break 99.99% of the time. Short of that, you're on your own, and it's no revelation that Windows works on all laptops but Linux simply doesn't — it works "most of the time", "with some caveats quite often". Blame manufacturers who don't write drivers for Linux (looking at you, Qualcomm, Nvidia...), blame OEMs who select those parts for their machines, but don't blame Linux itself — you get it for free with more than 4,000 drivers included last I checked.
It is still not on par with Windows (I kept it just in case). I get around 8-9 hours of battery life on Windows while on Linux it is more like 6-7 hours. But it is mostly due to the fact that Chrome/Chromium and Firefox don't support hardware acceleration on Linux and I watch quite a lot of youtube videos. There is a Chromium that uses the video acceleration API (VAAPI) but it comes from the user arch repository, there is now also a snap package (I haven't yet fully tried them).
I’d like it to work like macOS. It seems like that’s possible but it requires a swapfile to save state to. As far as I can tell that means enabling virtual memory which is a no no on SSD.
Just that and I wish Bluetooth remembered the on/off state it was left in after reboot.
> Just that and I wish Bluetooth remembered the on/off state it was left in after reboot.
That's just a Qualcomm problem. The BT is completely broken. Fixed in the latest kernel for me.
I'm fine with having a swapfile but I don't want it used for anything other than Suspend-to-disk. i.e. I don't want the SSD being hit with multiple writes caused by VM.
On the Mac it will suspend to RAM but also dump to an image file at the same time. If the mac runs out of power it will later restore from the image once power is restored.
That's possible on Linux using hybrid-sleep and suspend-then-hibernate but they require a swapfile.
I haven't yet found a way to have a swapfile without allowing that swapfile to be used for virtual memory too. I worry that virtual RAM will eat my SSD.
I guess it may be more the thought that it will kill the SSD than the reality but it’s still something I’d prefer to avoid if there’s a solution.
Has macOS solved this issue differently? Do they save RAM state to some non-SSD non-volatile memory, or do they just not care and dump it to SSD anyway?
If it was only used for suspend that would be fine because it would only be written to when you suspend the laptop, which in the grand scheme of things is pretty rare compared to writes caused by virtual memory swapping.
WiFi works. Sleep is "meh" compared to the Macbook, but that's on me for not having a swap partition.
Happy with my switch so far, and it's been 1y3mo
"Battery" is not one thing, so can't answer. Does idle draw count as an issue? Do services you can switch on/off count as a battery issue? In comparison, does MacOS indexer out iCloud sync going crazy count as a battery issue?