Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Linux and suspend/hibernate

As is often the case, when you remove the layers of faux hatred and loathing from Linux Hater's most recent post, you find a great deal of truth.

He speaks of the goal of quickening boot times in Ubuntu 9.04. I can vouch that the boot time is indeed far quicker, but he argues that it's the wrong thing to be focusing on. What they should really be looking at is suspend and hibernate support: on all platforms. To a large extent I agree with this: I don't think you could ever say that a faster boot is a bad thing, but you could quite legitimately argue that suspend and hibernate are far more pressing issues.

I've heard plenty of talk about getting these working properly on laptops, but not on desktop machines. This needs to stop: this feature is important on all machines. I would love to be able to sleep my desktop machine overnight, but it currently doesn't work: I end up having to do a hard reset on it. Contrast that with my Vista dual boot which handles it just fine, and wakes up really quickly (albeit sometimes with the DHCP client down which I need to manually fix each time: so M$ can't get it completely right either).

That's what they really need to be concentrating on, and I really hope they do soon.