I recnetly decided to switch to Debian full time for my personal laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen 3), after using it for a week or so I noticed that when I closed the lid it would die after less than a day. After some googleing I found the answer and they are below.

I also noticed that the machine never seemed to wake up like it did on Windows (just open it and it should come alive), after switching over to deep_sleep it fixed that issue.


You can check the current sleep mode with cat /sys/power/mem_sleep, it will return s2idle [deep], the item with the [ ] around it is the current one, s2idle is an older way that doesn’t really put the CPU to sleep so some device will still draw power. According to the Dell forum post I was ready their dell was pulling 2/3 when sleeping which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up over time.

To fix this we just need to update the grub GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in the /etc/default/grub file. To do this all you have to do is the following

  1. sudo nano /etc/default/grub

  2. Replace GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" (this might be different, for example my computer doesn’t have splash) with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash mem_sleep_default=deep"

  3. sudo update-grub