Comments on: There should be no suspend or hibernate

By: james

james — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 17:37:19 +0000

Why do i need to shutdown when i can Hibernate ?.Hibernating boots up quicker than Shutdown.

By: airtonix

airtonix — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 10:53:52 +0000

you need Deep Blue. nuff said

By: sil

sil — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 10:37:24 +0000

mrben: I think you’re not following my line of thought. You’re thinking of “hibernate” and “shut down” as two different things. If “shut down” was fast, then you wouldn’t need to have your laptop spend its time in hibernate; it should spend its time shut down.The reason people hibernate stuff is because shutdown-and-restart is so slow!

By: mrben

mrben — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 15:52:13 +0000

I both agree and disagree. Shutting down could well be hibernate, although I think suspend has its place too.

I rarely shut down my laptop (or my desktop). My laptop spends much of its time in hibernate. Shutdown is reserved for Windows when it’s doing it’s stupid restart the computer crap.

By: sil

sil — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 22:43:15 +0000

Shouldn’t have to care about power cuts. I am not at all convinced that you actually *need* write-behind caching that much any more. Everyone implemented it because discs were slow, but then discs got faster. Why not try and turn it off? Yes, we’ll be slower for a bit, but then discs will catch up in speed and you’ll have the advantage that you don’t need to “shut down” explicitly because everything’s already flushed. And you can just whip your USB stuff out without unmounting it, too…

By: Aquarion

Aquarion — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 22:35:13 +0000

Because without an extra component (A battery that will recharge really quickly and hold enough charge to keep the computer alive for x minutes to transfer x megabytes of data to HDD or - the Mac way - keep the RAM alive indefinately) you don’t know when the power will go. The ideal would be for the “Sleep” function to shut down everything but keep the memory on a low simmer so it stays alive, but there are two problems with that. One is that when it breaks (A sudden power cut so the memory doesn’t stay alive, a cleaner unplugs the computer, the battery fails) the metaphor shear is massive, you discover suddenly and with potential loss of data that you can’t _trust_ your computer not to lose everything in hibernate mode.

Second is that you need to build your systems to work with this idea. What should your network application do if it goes to sleep on network a and wakes up on network b? if the clock - to it - suddenly shifts fifteen hours forwards, jumps two time zones. How many of the gnome applications you use support the “reopen this desktop next login” feature that’s been in Gnome since 1.8 at least? And of those, how many were _part of gnome_?

And, because there are always going to be applications built before the Great Suspend Revolution, do we expect them to DTRT? Or do we assume they don’t, and enter another gray landscape where all these neat things would happen if everyone used these neat things (Like DCOP, or vfs/kio (why can’t they merge those?), XFML and Proper I18N?

but the biggest thing is the metaphor shear thing, and it’s the thing that breaks most of Linux Desktop crap. I just wish there was a way around it…

By: sil

sil — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:46:09 +0000

Aquarion: the point is this. Suspend is a *hack* designed to get around the fact that booting takes ages. The Mac Way is right, but I don’t think we need “sleep”. Close the laptop and it shuts down; open it and it bootas bs back to your desktop with your apps running. People have to understand the difference between the two and they shouldn’t have to.
Your session “suddenly being shut down” shouldn’t *matter*. Powercuts shouldn’t matter either. Computers should remember. I can’t see why they don’t; powercuts shouldn’t make any difference to that.

By: Aquarion

Aquarion — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:14:38 +0000

…and the clock’s out by an hour on your server.

By: Aquarion

Aquarion — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:13:56 +0000

I disagree. Shutdown/Boot is when it doesn’t remember your apps, hibernate is when it does. Suspend implies it will be the same when you wake it up again, which is occasionally not at all what you want (Corperate environments with hotdesking, libraries, schools).

I’d say there isn’t a difference between (login/boot & logout/shutdown) and (screensaver/suspend) etc. Also, what happens when your session is suddenly destroyed (Say, powercut)? That breaks the metaphor.

I like - and you should see this coming - The Mac Way. When I close the laptop, it goes to sleep. When I open it, it wakes up, with all ssh sessions renewed (within reason) all uptime continuing and all apps being fine. That’s what should happen. I shouldn’t even get a “suspending…” or “opening…” bar, it’s there, or it’s not there.