Okay, killed by Ubuntu is an exaggeration, as Ubuntu is not the only Linux distro doing this.
Still, the big news is that Linux Mint is bringing hibernation back.
In a recent blog post, the Mint team previewed a new Sleep Modes page in the System Administration tool. It’s meant to make enabling hibernation and setting it up correctly easy, without you editing config files by hand. The feature is planned for the upcoming Mint 27 release coming in December.
Mint hasn’t magically fixed the problems that made Ubuntu drop hibernation. What it does is give you the choice, along with two hybrid modes that sit between suspend and hibernation.
Hibernation vs suspend: What’s the difference?
Both features are about saving your session, which simply means everything you have open like your apps, windows and documents.
When you suspend (also called sleep), your computer keeps your session in RAM and powers down almost everything else. Waking up takes a couple of seconds. The catch is that RAM needs power to hold that data, so a suspended laptop keeps draining its battery.
If the battery dies while suspended, your session is lost, along with any unsaved work.
Hibernation copies your session from RAM to your disk and then powers off the machine completely. It uses no power at all. When you turn the computer back on, the session loads back from disk and your apps and windows are exactly where you left them.
In short, suspend is fast but needs power. Hibernation is slow but survives a dead battery.
Why Ubuntu and other distros dropped hibernation
Ubuntu disabled hibernation by default back in Ubuntu 12.04, I think. The reason was that it was unreliable slow, and that having two suspend modes confused people.
Every Ubuntu-based distro, including Linux Mint, inherited that decision. Actually, it’s not just Ubuntu. Many other Linux distros also do not offer hibernation option anymore.
Speed is indeed a problem. Writing gigabytes of RAM to disk and reading it back can take longer than a full reboot, especially on older hard drives.
Hibernation also needs a lot of swap. Your swap space has to be at least as large as the RAM in use so the whole session fits. Ubuntu ships a small swap file by default, and Fedora uses zram, which lives in RAM and is useless for hibernation.
Then there’s Secure Boot. With Secure Boot enabled, the Linux kernel runs in lockdown mode, and lockdown blocks hibernation because the saved image on disk isn’t signed and could be tampered with.
Since most new computers ship with Secure Boot on, hibernation simply doesn’t work for a large chunk of users. This is one of the main reasons Fedora Workstation doesn’t offer hibernation out of the box either.
The three sleep modes in Linux Mint
The new Sleep Modes page gives you three options. You pick the one that suits how you use your computer. You can enable all of them and choose which one to use from the power menu (at least that’s what it looks to me).
New sleep modes in Linux Mint 27
Hibernation
This is the classic mode. Your session is saved to disk and the computer shuts down completely, using no power. It’s slower than suspend and can take longer than a reboot to hibernate and resume.
Hybrid Sleep
Hybrid Sleep suspends your computer and saves the session to disk at the same time. Most of the time, you get the quick wake-up of suspend. If the battery runs out, you’ll need to plug in the charger, but your session is still there to resume from disk.
Suspend-then-Hibernate
This one suspends first and switches to hibernation only when the battery level gets critical. I think this is the most practical option for laptop users. You get fast resume in normal use and a safety net when the battery is about to die.
What Mint’s new sleep mode doesn’t fix
None of this removes the old limitations. You still need plenty of swap, and the tool flags a lack of swap as a problem. If Secure Boot is enabled, the tool lists it under Detected Problems. The good thing is that the tool writes its settings to its own systemd file, so you can turn these modes on and off without messing up your system.
I like how Mint takes a subtle approaches to “new features”. Not every new feature needs to have AI in it. This is not a shiny new change but it’s one of those changes that everyday Linux users are likely to use. Am I right?
So when would Hybrid Sleep be preferrable over Suspend-then-Hibernate?
I don’t know exactly, but I guess Suspend-then-hibernate requires a particular support in the hardware/bios to work, because it needs to monitor the battery level while asleep, and wake up automatically at a certain level for the OS to do the hibernate.
My main issue with hibernation in Linux is that it by default uses the same swap as ram overflow, so it fails if ram+swap is close to full - such as having a huge project of some kind in progress which would be a pain to reopen, one of the situations where hibernation would be very helpful.
This is fixable, I did it on my own laptop, and really wish I wrote everything down because it was a complex and unintuitive process, both getting it to save to a separate swap file from the swap partition (switched on/off in the systemd hibernation scripts), and getting it to boot from said file.
I really wish this was a supported scenario that was easy to set up. It drives me nuts for a feature where failure can mean data loss to have a failure mode easily reached by regular usage.
By contrast, Windows has always had separate swap and hibernation files, and generally works if drivers don’t mess it up (which they can on Linux too, Nvidia.)
Mint devs are waiting for your invaluable input.
Hiberation just isnt that valuable when modern sleep sips power.
If you need to have zero power usage, save files, shutdown and reboot later, it’ll be faster. If you need a quick off and on, with state, just sleep, it’ll last all week comfortably.
I wish this was the case, but I haven’t reliably gotten S0ix/S2idle only hardware to sip juice while sleeping. There is a decent daily drain.
S2Idle is slightly different to suspend to ram, as it keeps peripherals and other hardware awake, but even so, I have seen reports of 1% battery drain per hour, which is pretty good imo. What hardware do you have and what is your battery drain?
I’ve a Lenovo 7i Slim with a 258v, and it only reports having S2idle, no S3.
15-18% per day sounds about right, which makes 2-3 days on sleep a risk unless I’m folding it up at near full battery (and I generally cap charging to 80%).
I had an Asus ProArt 14 that ran a Ryzen 370 HX with a 4060 and that thing was at critical levels after a day and a half.
You say that like someone has figured out how to make a laptop reliably go to sleep and not stay on roasting itself if your backpack
-Microsoft, probably.
Agreed, I haven’t had a use for hibernation in decades.
I like having useful options so manifold that some users get confused, this is a PC dammit, down with smartphone thought
Notebooks exist.
Laptops use the same operating systems as PCs, and preserve as many PC functions as possible in their portability, which is probably behind a growing tendency to conflate the two. But your point is taken.
W for Mint!
“Still, the big news is that Linux Mint is bringing hibernation back.”
I’ve missed hibernation so much since switching from windows to Ubuntu
Hey, while we’re sucking off Linux Mint, can anymore explain why my box basically bricked itself with
/usr/lib/polkit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1 isn’t setuid root
Off a routine update? I’ve found conflicting guidance online, the AI prompts are (predictably) not very helpful, and since I’ve lost Internet everything has to be done by juggling a Windows laptop with a dozen help guides open on one hand and Linux on the other.
I swear to God, this is what makes me regret using a Linux system. One bad update and it’s a weekend running down obscure errors.
Every system is a whole universe. We don’t know what’s your app installation history, whether some app had polkit as requirement, you interrupted some previous installation fiddling with polkit, you postponed rebooting, etc.
What’s pretty certain is that you didn’t follow Mint’s recommendation of setting up a Timeshift recovery partition. If you had it’d be pretty easy to go back to a previous state.
@SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world that timeshift thing should be on by default.
Not really because it needs disk space which depends on your installation choices. However, ts configuration is suggested during the first boot.
@SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml the cost/benefit for an user that doesn’t really knows better makes it worthy.
Same user nags about Flatpak’s sizes. It’s impossible to take everyone by hand.
Thanks. I’ll see what I can find
