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Suspend and hibernate names

Submitted by hughsie on Sun, 2006-05-07 12:22. GNOME
GNOME

Microsoft Windows and OSX have decided on names for the sleep actions and it's about time Linux did the same. We are hurting the user experience with ad-hoc and confusing policies about naming.

Developing gnome-power-manager (and a chunk of the power management in HAL) gives me first-hand experience of the ways users, distros, packagers and developers can and do get this wrong.

From an Ubuntu bugzilla entry:

here's from NOTES from 'hotkey-setup'
When the machine should be put to sleep in some fashion:
KEY_SLEEP signals Suspend to RAM (Suspend, technically called "standby")
KEY_SUSPEND signals Suspend to Disk (Hibernate, technically called "suspend"...)

I hope this page can convert some of the wacky/zany/confusing/crazy software out there to stick to common names.

I'm now trying to get project, vendor and distro buy-in so that we can all be using the same names. Comments appreciated.

Sleep/Hibernate?

Submitted by cevans on Tue, 2006-05-09 03:25.

None of these terms are intuitive. The hibernate and suspend terms have their own problems. Animals which hibernate (I assume this is the idea behind using the term) gradually use up reserves, and I believe this is relatively well known in the public. So the term we would use for suspend-to-disk actually gives the impression of suspend-to-ram. On the other hand, suspend has no such time scale or resource usage connotations, and doesn't really even fit into the same category as hibernate.

I don't really understand why sleep/hibernate is rejected. While still having the resource usage issues for hibernate, the two terms are widely understood in the context of something being inactive for a time, and I am rather certain that the time scale and resource usage difference connotations for these terms are obvious to a majority of people. Suspend has none of these useful connotations.

It seems to me that the page is making arguments mostly based upon what has been used in the past, instead of thinking about what an average user would understand. The nomenclature is so confused that doing so is a bad idea - no matter what is chosen, many users from previous systems will be confused. In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to choose sleep/hibernate, and documentation that is easily accessed and understandable.

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