I’ve actually had someone thumb their nose at linux because of that name. “You mean the hat OS? The one those weird guys use? No thanks.” I’m paraphrasing but ya, that association is there for some people.

I agree, but I was making a different point. I think most people drove larger CARS, but today most people drive SUVs. And today’s SUVs are smaller than the cars of the past. Yes any particular model seems to have gotten bigger - but I think people in general are in smaller vehicles than they were when I was a kid.

I went to this train and automobile museum place in Maine. Podunk little place, but pretty cool and they really did have a lot of old cars to look at.

What shocked me was the size of the cars. Like huge ford expedition max trunk bigger than a pickup’s bed size.

Then I thought about the cars of the 70s and 80s. My old man’s Cutlass Supreme could easily fit 6 and had a huge trunk. God help you if your auntie drove a station wagon - there might have been a dozen kids piled into that sucker going to the beach.

Then I look at current suvs. They are pretty small comparatively speaking. I can’t get 5 into my grand Cherokee comfortably. Ya there are some huge suvs, but they aren’t the norm. The mini suvs are more common.

My unpopular opinion - the new “car” is an suv. And they have gotten smaller over the years, not bigger.

The real kick in the nuts is that Sonos is quite handy if you’re looking for whole house audio. Or it used to be.

Decent speakers that run over WiFi and don’t require knocking holes in walls. Could stream from your NAS, from a line in jack from a tv, or bridge your “real” stereo to your sonos products.

But they keep breaking all the things one by one. At this point I’m just waiting for someone to hack the speakers so I can use them with a foss alternative.

Excellent, that makes sense. I’ll try that command tonight at home, see what it does, and report back. I kind of want to know what it’s doing just because I’m curious.

I say a relay, but I agree with you - I couldn’t imagine a relay being used. But whatever it is on my desktop, it sounds just like a traditional ice cube relay clicking - and it’s quite loud. But I have no idea what it is. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a computer that made that noise before. My laptop makes no such noise obviously.

I did some more digging on this last night. I’m more confused now than I was before, and I don’t know what it’s doing.

The arch wiki defines three states, suspend to ram (sleep), suspend to disk(hibernate), and a hybrid suspend(presumably what my steam deck does).

First there is the “turn off the display” behavior. Doing anything brings the monitor back alive and I’m presented with the Lock Screen.

Second is what I believe to be sleep. This happens when I select “suspend” from the menu or leave it alone for a very long time. This mode doesn’t happen soon (maybe at all) if the computer is doing stuff. It appears to be in a lower power state-but I can’t say why I think that (maybe it’s just because the fans aren’t running? I dunno). Wiggling the mouse or doing anything wakes it back up.

Third is another state. It’s just like the above state, except it will not wake up with mouse movement, or clicking keys on a Bluetooth keyboard. I must push a key on the keyboard, the power button, or open the lid. It’s weird because it responds to things other than the power button.

Interestingly, my desktop behaves exactly the same way. But what’s interesting on the desktop is that I can hear a power relay clicking on from this third state. It’s distinctly different than the 2nd state - exhibiting power cutoff, but still responding to the keyboard.

Neither computer enters any other state even after days of being left alone.

So I dunno. Are modes 2 and 3 like two versions of sleep, and hibernate never activates? Or is state three hibernation but it responds to things it shouldn’t?

I have no idea. But now that I’ve played with it some more - I don’t want to say hibernate is working because I don’t know what it’s doing. All I know is that it has the above three behaviors which are consistent with my desktop machine.

HA! True. Remember when Google was always right and always exactly what you were looking for?

Pepperidge Farms remembers.

It was a couple hours. Just like on my desktop, wiggling the mouse wakes it from sleep, but not so in whatever that second state is when it’s left for longer. It definitely was something other than sleep. What it was - I’ll let you guys decide. Whether it behaves long term with fans in a laptop bag, that I don’t know - I haven’t had enough run time with it.

I’m just sharing a positive experience. If I see it misbehave I’ll be sure to update the thread with reality. But so far, it really is behaving much better than I expected.

I left I alone, it went off. I came back and wiggled the mouse, nothing happened. I pressed the enter key snd it came back to life -same behavior as my desktop.

Did it again, this time I tried closing the lid and opening it - it sprung to life when the lid opened.

You’re right - not the most thorough tests, but that’s what I did/saw.

This was the first time I tried to install on this laptop. I expected more issues because of the online comments about HP and this laptop series in particular (janky keyboard, the pen, touchscreen, folds over to a tablet, etc.) Over the years I’ve tinkered often with different distros, and on all the machines across all the attempts - there were a handful of annoyances or driver issues preventing me from having that smooth “it just works” experience. If I put in more effort or was smarter, I probably could have made that printer work, or get bluetooth working, whatever.

The last time I built a new desktop, I specifically bought components I knew would behave in Linux so I had a good experience. But I didn’t realize things had progressed to the point they are today where “it just works” applies to a much broader range of devices such as my laptop.

It’s nice! :)

Not with the volume buttons on the keyboard. Alsamixer helped a little - it was set to ~70% (whatever the line between white and red is). But it’s still quiet. But you can drive it way beyond 100% through software. The problem is pushing the volume button stops at 100%.

The lazy way is to open pulseaudio, grab the slider bar and put it to say, 150%. You can also do it with a terminal command. Somewhere close to the top of a Google search somebody mentioned they bound their volume keys to that terminal command/script where each press resulted in a 5% increase or decrease in volume - allowing the button presses to go beyond 100%. I may or may not do this.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t work - merely one of the annoyances I was expecting. Except I expected many of these and this is the only one I encountered.

Gnome