Thanks!

Yeah, I already disabled zram. I was following that web page.

I think the issue is that I need to add resume support to the initramfs. Because it’s an immutable distro, I have to do that a bit differently. As for the zram and immutable distro weirdness, I think it’s also Bazzite which is designed to work on the SteamDeck and other portable devices. I remember reading something about their sometimes having low amounts of RAM so they do some weird things to make up for it.

Anyhow, I’m going to try it tonight, wish me luck. :)

It looks like they say “not recommended” rather than “not feasible”.

It’s annoying when there’s a doc like that without a date on it. That could be 10 years old now, and might not be taking into account NVMe drives.

And yeah, I’ve been using “restore previous session”, but it’s annoying because it’s not restoring windows in their previous positions on their previous desktops. There is probably a way to enable it to remember previous window positions, but I’ve been trying to get hibernate working rather than poke at that. Besides, what I really want it to remember is my tmux windows and what they were running. That’s really not possible without hibernation / sleep / suspend.

Hmm, so you boot, you login, and after logging in it restores your previous session? Maybe the fact I’ve been using “save session” as a poor-man’s hibernate is messing with it. Thanks for the clues.

Do you set it to do automatic login? I think mine is storing the current session to swap properly, but I haven’t managed to get it to actually restore that session when booting yet. This is with Bazzite, which is a pretty close cousin of Kinoite, so it should be pretty similar.

I have a gaming machine with no crazy RGBs, but the video card has a loud fan when at maximum. Most of the time it isn’t at maximum. When using the desktop it’s nice and quiet. When gaming it depends on the game, but mostly it’s not too loud. But. BUT! When it first turns on, the fans go to max for a second or two. I was woken up more than once by Windows deciding it needed to turn my PC on to install an update, and the fans screaming for a second as it booted.

I eventually found a setting that disabled that behaviour, but Microsoft made it so incredibly hard. Now that that machine is almost 100% Linux I never have to worry about that.

Do you have hibernate working in an atomic distro? I’m still working on that.

Forget all the memes and jokes about Apple, their laptops suspend very well

The advantage of Apple is that the number of possible hardware combinations is pretty small. With Windows / Linux it’s nearly infinite.

With a small number of possible hardware configurations, it’s much easier to get sleep/suspend to work well because you can test every possible hardware combination and make sure it works.

But yeah, their system is basically flawless.

When you say hibernation, do you mean essentially powered off?

My understanding is that hibernation has always meant that the system is 100% off, but that when it next boots it can read from disk into RAM and then let you resume where you were before you shut down. I ask because “waking” a system in hibernate means turning it on, and it goes through the normal boot process. If it’s still on in some way, that doesn’t sound like hibernation to me. It sounds like “sleep” or “suspend” (ugh, but there are now annoying s<number> states that add confusion to all that.)

According to the FAQ I found, you mostly don’t need double your RAM. Especially for systems with lots of memory, they suggest instead the swap should be the square root of the RAM if you don’t hibernate. If you do it should be RAM + SQRT(RAM).

I’m not sure where the square root part comes from, but I think the general idea is that if you’re using more swap than that, you should just add RAM.

I’m still trying to get hibernate working on Bazzite. I followed the instructions I found and got it to the point that “Hibernate” is showing up in the menu, and when I use that menu item it seems to be saving state, but on boot I can’t get it to restore my previous session. I suspect it has to do with the Bazzite / Universal Blue bootc weirdness, but I haven’t spent much time digging into it yet.

Suspend / hibernate / resume is really a test of the quality of all your device drivers. That’s always been a weakness in Linux, not because of Linux itself but because Windows is so dominant.