Shall we hide the GUI for Hibernate in Natty?

[Philipp Kern]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 11:40:36AM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 11:04:22AM -0800, Rick Spencer wrote:
> > Natty is currently NOT showing the Hibernate option in the list of
> > shutdown choices. This is currently an experiment, but I thought it
> > might be worth discussing the pros and cons on these lists as well.
> > 
> > So, thoughts, discussion, feedback, options, suggestions, rants, raves,
> > etc... ?
> I used to use hibernate a lot, even though it was slow like mentioned in
> the original email, it was a nice way to save state.  Handy when on
> airplanes.
> 
> But I agree it's so painfully slow and unreliable to be unusable in its
> present state.  Hiding the option in the menu and declaring it
> officially unsupported (but making it configurable and still callable
> from pm-utils and so on, just no bug reports) seems like a good
> approach.

Not everyone thinks that vast amounts of RAM are actually useful, despite the
fact that hardware manufacturers would like us to think that[1].

Furthermore computers do draw a significant amount of power when in suspend.
Try leaving your notebook in suspend for a few days.  Of course, if you know
beforehands, that you won't need it that long, you'll turn it off.  If you
forget it in suspend, your battery will be very unhappy.  (And by the way,
if ACPI suggests that it's time to shut down, my computer actually tried
to hibernate[2].  Which is kind of reasonable if it works.  You need to take
care to deactivate that if you scrap hibernation, though.)

That said something like tuxonice makes hibernating more useful, as it's
compressing the RAM contents and thus less needs to be written to disk.

Given that I won't work on it, I just wanted to voice an opinion.

Kind regards
Philipp Kern

[1] Or maybe it's actually needed for newer Windows versions, I don't know.
    I don't think more than 2G are actually useful on a single-user desktop
    with moderate requirements.  But of course, most of that will then be
    sucked up by inefficient browsers and tabs therein.
[2] If it didn't throw up a kernel panic in my backpack, that is.  Getting
    hotter and hotter, maybe it doesn't HLT after a panic?  Something in
    me says that this can't be, though.
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