Be mad at Dell, not Linux.

Pretty much every sleep issue I've encountered in the wild is due to the hardware manufacturer's shitty implementation.

The only reason some features "just work" with Windows is because they only care if it works with Windows.

Ultimately it still sucks if it happens with your hardware, but you should direct your frustration to the right party. Maybe one day people will care enough and interoperability can become the default.

Either way it doesn't change the fact that you need to do this on Linux but not Windows. There's dozens of fiddly little things like this that you don't need to do on Windows.

I use each OSX, Ubuntu and Windows daily but I could never recommend my mother switch to Ubuntu or Mint because of things like this.

Come on. Linux is stable enough for anyone. So many people have done exactly what you said can't be done, and then never again had to play tech support for their relatives. I can get a flash disk with Linux and it will work for the proverbial mom for years without touching it.

What I found happens often is pure confirmation bias. People already hate Linux and love Windows/OSX, then find reasons to confirm that. I'm sure I have some of that too, but I try to see all sides.

The amount of blue screens and shitty issues my wife puts up with on Windows is astonishing. Disconnecting/reconnecting dongles so they work again. Manually searching for drivers. She re-installs Windows every few months and normalizes it.

Same goes for OSX. Apple fanboys at work having random segfaults on services, OS upgrades that sometimes takes them down a full day. A coworker of mine still runs a years old OSX version because last time he updated he had to pay hundreds of dollars for Apple care to get his MacBook working again. I still remember when I had to use OSX, wasting days searching for solutions after every OS upgrade.

My point is: there are issues with all OSes and this generalization that "Linux is the bad one" is a plain lie. Especially for basic usage, which is what normal people usually stick to.

Yes, if you pick a bad distro and sometimes gets hardware from manufacturers that intentionally fuck Linux over, you're gonna have a hard time.

But on the other side, you have a choice. You can choose a more stable distro, you can tweak it as you like. Something other OSes can't offer.

Everyone is free to choose, but this meme against Linux is plain tiring.

Its often the case that when apps crash (on any OS) due to bugs, its the OS that gets blamed by the user. It is easy to say "blame Dell", but you'd have to be familiar with the code-base to know whose fault it was.

It is 2023, and they seem to have completely broken hibernate on Windows. Didn't work reliably for a while, intermittently failing to wake up correctly in various ways, one of those ways being a black screen with no choice but to reboot¹, and it seems to have vanished as an option on most (maybe all) laptops I've used recently².

And sleep doesn't always stay slept. We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty³.

So sleep/hibernate not working right is hardly a significant difference when comparing Linux to Windows. In fact one of the laptops I had trouble with did sleep and hibernate properly when Linux went on it for a while, so at least sometimes the difference is not in favour of Windows.

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[1] the couple of times that happened to me, the machine would still work via RDC and other such so an orderly restart could be arranged if I had another machine on the same network, but if I had no such machine available like when travelling a hard-reset had to be forced

[2] I'm told you can force it to be available again, but I assume the removal is an admission that is doesn't work properly so enabling it is risky

[3] being in a bag isn't great for cooling airflow!

> We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty

I've seen a hypothesis for this relatively common issue, which is: laptop goes to sleep while connected to charger, then charger is unplugged but the laptop still believes it gets charged and starts downloading OS updates, emptying the battery and almost overheating in a bag.

I don't have a Windows laptop to test it myself, though.

I sometimes use windows on my work laptop and usually keep it up to date, meaning I won't let the installed updates wait around for a reboot. It still ends up hot for no reason while I carry it around, and the battery half empty.

Hell, while asleep on the desk (so plugged-in, grated) it tends to be hotter than while under active use. Under Linux, the fan basically never spins as long as I don't compile stuff and the PC is cool to the touch.

I also make a point of unplugging it before I close it because, contrary to Linux on the same machine, there's a very high probably that if I unplug the dock while the PC sleeps, the screen won't wake up again in a usable state (it's typically on, but it's either blank or it displays random colors). It gets its power via said dock.

This is a run-of-the-mill, full-Intel HP Elite book, with an HP dock running Windows 11, as recommended by HP.