There are more than a billion PCs in use and, according to StatCounter, only 71 percent of them run Windows. Among the rest, about 4 percent run Linux. That’s tens of millions of people with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc as their desktop operating system. I envy them.
Windows 11 has become more annoying lately as it shoves ads for XBox Game Pass in my face, pushes AI features no one asked for and demands that I reconsider the choices I made during installation on a regular basis. Plus, it just isn’t that attractive.
I’m ready to try joining that industrious four percent and installing Linux on my computers to use as my main OS, at least for a week. I’ll blog about the experience here.
It’s hard to give up Windows forever because so many applications only run in Microsoft’s OS. For example, the peripheral software that runs with many keyboards and mice isn’t available for Linux. Lots of games will not run under Linux. So I think it’s likely I’ll be using Windows again, at least some of the time, after this week is through.
However, for now, I’m going to give Linux a very serious audition and document the experience.
My laptop did not go to sleep
Some people have similar experiences regarding sleep issue, including system just went blank on wake up.
From my experiences on Linux Mint in two different laptops, the sleep issue related to Linux system cache. By default, many Linuxes use these settings, vm.dirty_ratio and vm.dirty_background_ratio are about 5 to 20 percent of the available system memory. This is fine if your system has less than 4GB of memory installed, but if your system has 8GB or more of memory, this can cause problems later on.
So I have this “can’t wake up” issue on my two differents laptop, the first laptop has 8 GB of memory and the second laptop has 16 GB. And both laptops are running on Linux Mint.
In search of a solution, I came across this conversation https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/10/25/39
I also found some possible system cache related issues on various distros.
So I tried what Linus suggested, and I use lower values than suggested. And it worked!, the “can’t wake up” issue on both laptops just gone in instant!