This is my most needed feature in linux. I want zero ‘connect/disconnect’ sounds and if the laptop is asleep I don’t want it to wake up in the middle of the night for no reason.
I have an infinite supply of Windows laptops from work but I hate them with a burning passion and I can’t afford to replace my Macbook.
If someone can tell me what linux distro is the most silent and least annoying I will erase my entire Windows partition this weekend.
I don’t want it to wake up in the middle of the night for no reason.
What Windows have been doing the last couple years is they moved from regular sleep to some poorly implemented standby mode that works more like a phone does where it still runs just very power efficiently and still does stuff in the background. Macs have been doing that for a long time except they actually did it right so it doesn’t suck.
Linux doesn’t support it yet so you’ll get classic stop the world sleep anyway, but either way it’ll always be customizable even when connected sleep gets implemented.
I know I’m showing my age with this comment, but when I don’t use my computer, I turn it off.
Under Windows, I never wanted to shut it down because it took forever to both shut down and boot back up, so I used the sleep function. But I’m definitely old enough to have grown up with the habit of turning off the computer when I’m done.
That same laptop running Linux gets shut down when I’m done using it for the night because it’s just so much faster, and it applies the automatic updates my distro uses - painlessly. Why are Windows updates so terrible?
The applying updates on shutdown is another interesting thing… Where did that come from btw? In the old days, my Linux machine used to apply updates in the background. Or ask me. And now a few distros have switched to doing it on shutdown (or worse: restart and start some systemd task and shut down again), which is mildly annoying if you want to shut down your laptop, throw it into the backpack and catch the next train.
Windows 95 had sleep mode and hibernation. Sleep mode, then as today, writes the system state to RAM, then shuts down power to everything but the RAM. Hibernation works in a similar way, except the system state is written to disk, then the computer is powered completely off. There’s no “do stuff in the background” mode.
Yes there is, “Modern Standby”/S0ix/S2idle.
The CPU is still in a sleep state but less deep than regular S3 suspend, and it can wake up much frequently and silently to do stuff like check emails or whatever.
See “Suspend to idle” : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate
A new Linux OS may emit unfamiliar sounds if some network app is still running and set to use them for notifications. Quitting the (sound-making) app(s) and/or the network connection will can avoid that problem. Of course you can just turn the sound volume all the way down.
Suspended OSs may sometimes ‘wake up for no reason’ if some vibration causes the mouse, for example, to jiggle around enough.
Logging out of your user account before suspending/sleeping the machine will stop that stuff without having to dig thru settings. Faster to log back in than to reboot.
Any distro can do this. However the “user friendly” ones would tend to be the worst about it. Wanting to beep boop to get your attention for updates etc. I won’t say which distro I use “by the way”. But with Linux you are the admin. You own the system. You can disable noisy update notifiers or things that would wake the system. I had an HP elite book with garuda on it. I accidentally left it on and “charging” for several days. Thought it was unplugged and off. Didn’t show any signs of life till I dropped something on the KB.
If it’s truly in a sleep mode, and you don’t have Wake-on-LAN enabled, no distro that I’m aware of will wake itself and make noise.
But the belts-and-suspenders solution is to make a cron job that mutes the audio devices in the evening, and unmutes it in the morning. Depending on your cron subsystem and configuration, this will work even if the laptop is asleep at the trigger times; some cron systems guarantee execution of events - systemd is one of them, and is the most likely one you’ll encounter.
But, seriously: if you put Linux to sleep, it stays asleep; you have to work to get it to wake itself up to do things, and it usually requires some external trigger.
Maybe I am missing something, but why not just shut down the machine for the night?
I’ve changed some of my habits but it would be ideal if I wasn’t always trying to outfox the computer. It’s a laptop, so for me that means it is on on most of the time and plugged into a dock. I’m a night owl too so I end the day with lots of stuff open and plans to keep going in the morning, I’d rather not shut down. I also struggle with my mood and often little things that seem easy can feel like a lot. I like my IT to be low maintenance.
I think others have already covered linux being silent if you want it to be.
I just want to acknowledge your headline, which made wonder if someone had named their newborn baby “Linux”. Thanks for the laugh. :)
You just know someone probably has named their kid “Linux” 😅
It can easily be configured to emit no sounds, and wake-up is usually a function of your BIOS settings, disable wake-up on LAN, etc and you won’t have an issue.
