Hibernate should be the default, not suspend

[Bob Meyers]

This is not a trivial consideration. Allow me to explain.

Suspend is dangerous because:

1. Crashes while entering or exiting suspend can leave the CPU in a high power state. If the machine has crashed, then software may not be able to initiate thermal shutdown in a thermal runaway emergency. This could start a fire, especially if the laptop has been hastily thrown into a suitcase. Dodgy lithium batteries only amplify the risk to public safety.

2. Suspend is completely ill-conceived from first principles, but it cannot be fixed at this point. The reason is that there is no way for the OS to perform this operation, other than via use of the ACPI tables and device drivers which assist it in doing so. Inevitably, third party device vendors fail to completely restore their devices. In other words, some register settings may not be the same after resume, leading to performance problems or fickle bugs which are extremely difficult to isolate. Worse, the differences may be in hidden registers which do not appear in PCI configuation space, MMIO, or IO register locations. Even data corruption can occur if SATA settings are not restored properly, for example.

Suspend is garbage that should only be used by people trying to practice their debugging skills. Please replace the "Power" menu defaults with hibernate, which is much more reliable because it involves a full system reset.

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

I believe this is a "can't fix" because of limited hardware support for hibernate