The steamdeck works so well, because Valve spent a LOT of effort fixing AMD, wayland and pipewire issues for their handheld. Some of that then trickles down to other machine other parts don't(like sleep, and audio). For example, they have a proper filter chain for their speakers and microphone.
Since recently buying an AMD based laptop I've come to realize how much better Intel's software support, both in Linux AND in windows is. And that patterns moves all across AMD product lines.
For example, they pressured all vendors to drop S3, dropped it from Phoenix and went all in with Microsoft's s2idle without any clear way to support it. As a result you have multiple vendors with half working idle implementations, overheating and other bugs.
Intel has also vastly surpassed AMD is their ML stack, even though their GPU's are less powerful.
> For example, they pressured all vendors to drop S3, dropped it from Phoenix and went all in with Microsoft's s2idle without any clear way to support it. As a result you have multiple vendors with half working idle implementations, overheating and other bugs.
Are there still Intel parts with working S3? Linux seems to think that my 11th gen intel laptop supports it, but it doesn't work (hangs on going to sleep). I haven't figured how to coax Windows into using that instead of s2idle. This particular model doesn't offer a BIOS toggle for that, as I hear it was the case on some thinkpads.
I'm also not convinced the s2idle situation is that much better on the Intel side. I sometimes use Windows on my work laptop and let it hang around suspended when I'm done for the day. Yesterday evening (Sunday), after two days of doing nothing, it figured it would be as good a time as any to turn into a jet engine. I also sometimes find it is pretty warm coming out of my backpack after a 45-60 minute commute with a long portion of walking, even when it's close to freezing outside (we've had a few weeks of 0-2º days where I live). This doesn't seem like an isolated thing: see all the people complaining about other manufacturers' laptops not going to sleep properly while being carried around closed in bags.
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edit: found a way to enable S3 on windows. It goes to sleep but doesn't wake up. It actually seems to mess up the PC so much that after a forced reboot the fan goes crazy for a few minutes before showing the UEFI logo.
The sleeping is so broken on all the laptops these days that I'm seriously considering buying an old laptop because all the nice things you get with a modern powerful laptop aren't worth it if the battery is randomly empty and you can't turn it off.
It's astonishingly inexplicably broken and the industry completely ignores it.
It is very hardware dependent. So you have to get ~lucky with your machine and then you're set, basically. (Though it's a weighted distribution; ex. ThinkPads have better than average odds)
For me, that has technically been the case on Linux, too, including on the laptop I was referring to. On Windows, it happens that the screen will be garbled on wake, but I don't use Windows that much to care.
The only issue is that s2idle drains the battery like crazy compared to S3. But I guess "it's not a bug / works as intended".
> The only issue is that s2idle drains the battery like crazy compared to S3.
Properly working s2idle should use as little power as S3, but it seems to be much more common with s2idle that some piece of hardware is left enabled while it should have been disabled to save power.
Well it seems that in theory it should exist, amd_s2idle script that tests various things. I can get the machine into what seems to be sleep, but if you listen careful on the fan you will hear that it's constantly restarting. The script then reports that most of the time is actually spent in user space, when what it should really do is spend over 90% in actual idle. Unfortunately no one seems to have a good answer on how I can find out what causes the user space sleep inhibitions. It's not a wakeup.
This is interesting. On my HPs, both Intel and AMD, the fan-on-while-it-should-be-sleeping thing only happens with Windows. Under Linux, the fan will turn off even if it was spinning, say if I put it to sleep during a compile and the laptop is hot.
On Linux, the fan never turns on and the pc never gets warm while asleep. Windows sometimes does something that requires the fan to spin like crazy, and the PC is usually somewhat warm to the touch.
You can just hibernate though. With fast SSD/NVMe storage it's nearly as quick as S3 standby was. (The one pitfall is that hibernation might require you to disable Secure Boot if you're on a recent version of Linux, due to lockdown-mode shenanigans.)
It depends on other things. For me, waking from S3 has always been nearly instant. Booting from hibernation is nowhere near that. Just the freaking UEFI takes ages to initialize.
If I'm putting my laptop in a laptop bag hibernation is just fine. I couldn't care less that it will have to go through UEFI and OS boot again, I just want it to be off. And for short pauses the CPU idling suspend is okay.
But there's no denying that my quality of life took a hit by this "improvement": I now have to go out of my way to choose hibernation or standby, depending on how long I expect to need it to sleep, instead of just closing the lid.
Under Windows, there's also the fact that you have to go out of your way to enable hibernation.
I have a similar issue with my dell xps - if I leave it suspended with being plugged in for a few days the battery drains, but what is more frustrating is plugging in to charge from that state seems to boot to a bios screen and turn it into a space heater.
It's caught me out a few times where I haven't noticed and frankly seems like a safety hazard as it'll get very hot.
(If anyone has tips to prevent this that would be great, running fedora)
I have an intel Thinkpad X1 Carbon, S3 sleep is catastrophically broken:
Putting the laptop to S3 sleep puts the M.2 SSD into some kind of sleep mode, when the system wakes back up, it fails to wake the M.2 SSD back up. The sleeping M.2 SSD mode is persistent across reboots, so upon reboot the laptop fails to boot because it can't find it's main storage. The only way I've found to fix this is to pull the SSD and put it in another working machine.
S0ix is also completely broken under linux with it draining the battery 30% in around 4 hours.
> S0ix is also completely broken under linux with it draining the battery 30% in around 4 hours.
Does it work better under Windows? On both my machines, one zen3 and one intel 11th gen (but otherwise almost identical hp laptops) I don't see any difference in battery drain between the two.
Interesting, can you elaborate on that? The behaviour I observed is that going into S3 behaves exactly the same as if you try to unload and reload the amdgpu driver.
I'm really confused by this post as AMD chipset is the de facto recommendation in any laptop discussion forum on Linux. AMD graphics cards are also much better on linux too so it almost seems like you got things in reverse?
I personally find AMD GPU support under Linux to be absolutely excellent. Only thing I don't like is the "secure processor" which requires signed and sometimes encrypted firmware to run. The older cards don't have this.
I have a RX 6600 XT and it was a PITA in many instances. Sometimes black screen at boot which resolves after GDM is started. Freezes when waking up which is an issue that come and go on Arch after each update cycle. Bizarre frame drops in games out of nowhere. Like one day I had stable >60fps but next day after a reboot with no change to the system it stayed ~15fps. This was a huge pain for almost an year after launch but I think it is stable enough by now.
At least on iGPU business Thinkpads, Intel systems still seem to be more robust with Linux. The difference isn't necessarily on graphics, just less bugs overall ranging from wireless (bt/wifi) to monitor / dock compatibility etc.
That's quite interesting to know. Which laptop/AMD cpu did you purchase?
I may have to buy a new laptop in the near future. Linux is my default OS. I've been happy with my existing Ryzen 7 3000 series laptop for 5 years or so. I want to know if Intel is doing better these days.
I just got Thinkpad T14s Gen4 with AMD chipset and it's brilliant! The chipset works out of the box with great performance and battery (Tested on Arch and Nixos) and the 16:10 OLED semi-matte screen is a must upgrade (better than any other laptop screen on the market imo). My only gripe is the fingerprint magnet body material which is annoying to care for.
I'm running nixos and plasma wayland without any issues. Even the fractional scaling works out of the box.
No burn that I could notice in 2 months of use now. I don't think that's a major problem for laptops tbh. I don't use fingerprint sensors on laptops and ordered mine without on but AFAIK it does work on linux if I recall correctly.
Take a look at this amdgpu issue tracker[1], you will find that there are lot of devices across vendors having the same issue. And even if you get s2idle to work, which people on my machine do by disabling wakeups with something like the following, it looks like the system is sleeping, but it will often still spend most of the time in userspace, which leads to heat issues if you are foolish enough to throw it in your backpack at that point:
for i in $(cat /proc/acpi/wakeup|grep enabled|awk '{print $1}'|xargs); do case $i in SLPB|XHCI);; *) echo $i|tee /proc/acpi/wakeup ; esac; done
Not as good as when running windows (when has there ever been a laptop with linux power management as good as windows?), but better out of the box experience than most laptops I’ve tried.
Wasn‘t acpi always a shitshow? I remembered https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7279 even s3 was shitty , s2idle is just a „software wrapper“ around a already broken thing. I think the only way to fix any kind of power management issues would mean to replace the whole system with a more modern interface, which probably would be extremely hard to do, since every hardware vendor and os would need to change a lot of things.
Heck we actually have problems with modern standby on windows on dell precision tower workstations, we even tried windows 11. but sometimes it will just fail and it will try to go to standby and than it fails and it will resume in a cycle, it will not resume and you hear the power cycle, it’s the biggest hibernation shit show that I’ve seen so far, the thirst things I do on these machines is disable it.
It’s the same thing as https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/weg/... aka fake s5, which is just stupid on nvme disks.
No software around acpi does not fix it, it makes it worse.
I have a Zen2 desktop and Zen3 laptop, and power save mode / suspend works flawlessly. Is there an errant service/app on your system which disables suspend?
seems to me you bought a bad laptop. i bought a cheap generic lenovo and the only thing that is not working is the fingerprint reader, which is probably for the best.
even the touchscreen / stylus works great and that is not my words but a family member that gifted my laptop (due to irrelevant to tech, life reasons)
Since recently buying an AMD based laptop I've come to realize how much better Intel's software support, both in Linux AND in windows is. And that patterns moves all across AMD product lines.
For example, they pressured all vendors to drop S3, dropped it from Phoenix and went all in with Microsoft's s2idle without any clear way to support it. As a result you have multiple vendors with half working idle implementations, overheating and other bugs.
Intel has also vastly surpassed AMD is their ML stack, even though their GPU's are less powerful.