Fine tuning of power management with suspend ("standby") - TUXEDO Computers

Linux distributions use background processes to control aspects of power management. This includes how the device behaves after being closed. To keep this complex topic as understandable as possible even for beginners, we work with a very simplified analogy. Basically there are different levels, just like with living things:

"Suspend-To-Idle" ☞ ~Microsleep

"Standby" ☞ "Nap"

"Suspend-To-RAM" ☞ "Deep Sleep"

"Suspend-To-Disk" ☞ "Winter Sleep"

If your battery consumption is abnormally high when closed, this is usually a sign of an incorrect level. Use the following command to find out which level your system is currently using:

cat /sys/power/mem_sleep

If "s2idle" is bracketed, your notebook uses the first level. This switches off the hardware comparatively sparingly, it allows a faster wake-up at the expense of battery life. With the following distributions it has been confirmed so far that in some cases level 3 is not preselected:

• Ubuntu 20.04
• Ubuntu 18.04
• openSUSE Leap 15.1

With the following commands you can change it to the third level "deep" (please type in your password when asked):

sudo -s

sed -ie 's/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="\(.*\)"/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="\1 mem_sleep_default=deep"/' /etc/default/grub

Ubuntu

update-grub && exit

openSUSE

grub2-mkconfig && exit
After a restart you should now notice an improvement in the battery life when closed.

Note
It is possible that the touchpad and keyboard may occasionally not respond after waking up. This is a bug that affects all notebook manufacturers across all distributions. Opening and closing them again usually solves the problem. Alternatively the "Moon key" (usually Fn+F12) can be used. Observations show that the automatic setting into standby mode by the system itself (timeout in the energy options) fails most often.

Bonus notes for technically experienced Linux users

Here you can find an official and detailed description of the individual states: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/states.txt

Attentive readers may now wonder why S4 ("Suspend-To-Disk", "Hibernate") is not used by default. After all, this would offer the highest energy savings! We receive inquiries about this again and again. In a nutshell, the reason is that it can be unstable. As a result, some distributions have completely removed the option from their graphical user interfaces and thus no longer officially support "out of the box". This has been the case for several years.

The S4 setup can be a matter of five minutes, or even hours, in some cases even unsuccessfully. This is independent of the notebook manufacturer and even a penguin in a magic cape can't conjure up an island solution here. Due to the complexity, we cannot support you with the manual setup by phone or e-mail. We recommend to browse the official wikis of the usual distributions (Ubuntuusers, ArchLinux Wiki etc.), because these are the places where the instructions are most likely to be kept up-to-date.