I've been able to sleep my laptop (mostly) reliably since 2006. It all depends on what hardware you have. The "mostly" is because in 2007, ATi released an update to their catalyst binary blob driver that broke sleep and hibernation. I try to steer clear of non-open source drivers now.
The fix is available in kernel 2.6.38 ( Ubuntu 11.04 is 2.6.37)
I run Ubuntu 10.10 with a PPA 2.6.38 kernel to get around the problem. Please note this problem is at the kernel level - going Fedora will not help.
Ubuntu is more or less the only OS I use currently - sleep/suspend/resume issues still exist. I do hope they integrate projects like TuxOnIce, etc. into the mainline - I would gladly pay couple of hundred dollars to have working sleep/resume on Ubuntu laptops.
Considering that Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus would have about 15-20 models at one time (considering the motherboard + wireless), I'm surprised there is no third party company providing supported Linux - for companies like KSplice, this could be another line of business.
true - my mistake.
Although you should also know that 2.6.38 and 11.04 has a mysterious power management bug that increases laptop battery usage significantly.
