Linus Tech Tips
1 HN recommender · recommended in 9 months, 2022–2026
11:06 · 4.3M views · Dec 3, 2022
Linus Tech Tips explains how Windows Modern Standby causes laptops to drain battery while asleep, arguing it makes Windows laptops hard to recommend compared to MacBooks.
HN links it as the standard reference whenever laptop sleep and battery drain on Windows come up, including the later point that nothing has improved.
15 comments from Hacker News
> After several nights of losing all my free time after work only to wake up the next morning to a dead laptop battery, I treated myself to an m2 13” mbp. LTT just did a video on this: this video tl;dw: It may not be a Linux/OS problem, but rather a BIOS problem, which would explain why nothing you did helped. Getting a MBP is valid fix if you disable "Wake for network access" on it.
As I understand it, it's also the CPU manufacturers, motherboard suppliers, and system integrators. Intel and AMD are not consistently supporting S3, and some motherboards (iirc) toggle it off even when the chip purports to support it. System integrators may also leave the BIOS setting for S3 off even when supported. As for why? As many know from the history of Linux support for sleep, it's not always been great. Every device in the system has to support it, and there's a risk of corrupting state when execution resumes. It's much easier to keep the system running in a lower power mode. That's true of all of the device drivers and firmware on the system too. It's frankly shoddy work though that it works so poorly that the order in which one unplugs their laptop and closes the screen affects whether it correctly enters S0ix. I can't believe issues like that have made it out of QA on laptops over and over again, resulting in laptops overheating and reaching 0% charge. The Linus Tech Tips video here goes into the details: this video
Even Windows machines have issues with the new low power states. It's called "Windows Modern Standby" and doesn't work on Windows =) LTT had a video about this two years ago and to my knowledge it hasn't improved much since: this video You can't even disable it easily, it used to be a menu item, then a CLI command and then a registry entry. They're all gone. IIRC the actual reason is a BIOS level issue, they can't support both S0 and S3 sleep properly.
> I just want my laptop to sleep and awake properly, without draining the battery. To be fair this is _also_ a massive problem on Windows too, because of Windows Modern Standby encouraging laptop makers to replace ol' reliable S3 sleep with the terribly broken modern standby stuff. Macbooks and certain Framework models are the only laptops left with reliable sleep. Old video but nothing's really improved since: this video
Rather than a blanket "Linux Preinstalled", I'd like to know about S3 sleep support. Eg, it would be nice to know which laptops still support real S3 sleep, and not just the new "Windows modern standby" mode. I watched an LTT that indicates that Windows modern standby apparently doesn't even work right with Windows. ("Microsoft is Forcing me to Buy MacBooks - Windows Modern Standby" this video )