PikaOS maybe too “hobby oriented” to expect “sleep stability”, but I understand most/all bugs to be debian or kde upstream ones. Is gnome still much better at stability? Is there a distribution that fixed sleep problems for you? open vs closed nvidia drivers?
Are there motherboard manufacturers that suck less at linux?
It’s Nvidia that that jumps out in your question.
They are
/werenotorious for lackluster support on Linux and sleep/wake issues are/weresignificant.IIRC you still need to configure a few bits to get it to work properly (maybe just a systems service enable?).
… And it looks like it’s still a constant issue.
Thread with various fixes and tweaks: https://gist.github.com/bmcbm/375f14eaa17f88756b4bdbbebbcfd029
maybe switching to x11 driver before sleep would solve it from that thread :(
Before asking for another distro, you should figure out, what is the root cause of the trouble you observe. Usually sleep/wake up under Linux are highly hardware dependent. Even the SteamDeck, which has payed first level hardware support by Valve, has sometimes trouble waking up properly after sleep, at least in desktop mode. Good luck!
A problem with PikaOS is that the log files seem bad or I couldn’t find the right one. Lots of seemingly amateur errors in log (no permission for system to write to system) that don’t seem to lead to imminent crash. Log files don’t pick up having to hit power switch maybe.
My main question was the easy “did a distro switch solve sleep issues for anyone”? Maybe switch to Mint would at least have more google hits on solving issues? Someone downvoted the “switch to x11 graphics driver before sleep” try, and I’m losing patience on tracking it down as you suggest.
Not sure if it is applicable, but wouldn’t it be an option to use the Fedora Workstation Live CD, mount your swap partition into the live system and send it to sleep via SystemD?
This should give you feedback with a fairly recent kernel and Gnome has (at least for me) been the desktop option with the least amount of bugs I encountered.
Waking up from sleep is of course part graphics card/drivers, and BIOS code. My husband had his share with his nvidia card crashing the system when coming up from sleep under Wayland, but I believe these things have been mostly ironed now. However, if you have a buggy BIOS, you’re out of luck. I’ve had such a DELL laptop, latest firmware installed, and no matter which distro I tried, it wouldn’t wake up from sleep properly. So, if that’s your issue, there’s not much you can do, apart from getting compatible hardware. There are hardware lists of compatible hardware in some places, including archlinux’s wiki i believe.
I use Fedora with KDE and never have issues. Though I no longer have NVIDIA cards in any of my computers. The drivers suck on Linux in general and were the cause of many of my previous issues with Linux overall.
I really haven’t had any issues for like 10+ years. Using Debian with Gigabyte motherboards, ThinkPad, and Dell XPS’.
I have a Gigabyte motherboard, and the only issue I’ve run into—even with Arch—is this specific B550 board uses some third-party sensors, and the necessary
it87module doesn’t load and isn’t included by default. This makes it impossible to utilize tools like CoolerControl to manage fan curves.Thankfully, some kind soul manages a DKMS module via the AUR, in spite of both Gigabyte and the IC manufacturers being less than helpful.
My board uses an IT879X and works just fine with the mainline drivers.
Mine has the IT8688, and it doesn’t.
On amd gpu+cpu fastboot off. I have it working on 3 pc’s like this. Asus mostly.
It’s probably more to do with hardware than distro. That said, using major distros is more likely to win. FWIW I’ve used fedora and voidlinux on my 3 Dell laptops over the last 12 years with nary a problem. One of them had nvidia but I used nouveau.
No issues with Debian / Ubuntu on many laptops since early 2010s, mostly with Intel graphics. I had a Vostro 1400 with Nvidia and it also resumed fine, but that was 2009-11 so the experience with the Nvidia driver from that time is likely irrelevant.
Could try Fedora based like Bazzite or just regular Fedora. Obviously a sample size of 2 isn’t saying much, but Bazzite is less buggy with the hardware on my HP laptop, and my destop with an Nvidia GPU.
I’m running CachyOS with Gnome, Gigabyte motherboard, AMD processor, closed Nvidia drivers, and sleep works just fine. I haven’t had any issues.
my Dell laptop on debian can suspend and wake flawlessly, and uses basically no energy while suspended. Like 12 hours later it’ll maybe lose 1-2%.
System76, Framework, even Dell officially supports Ubuntu in limited cases.
I’d just try a couple different distros and see which one has the fewest issues for you. If you like, you can pay for official support from Dell or Canonical. If you do identify an issue in a supported scenario (Ubuntu version + device model) they will actually help you troubleshoot and resolve the issue. RHEL is the same if you want to pay a bit more.
