1y ago

Does Linux emit random sounds or wake up in the middle of the night?

This is my most needed feature in linux. I want zero 'connect/disconnect' sounds and if the laptop is asleep I don't want it to wake up in the middle of the night for no reason.

I have an infinite supply of Windows laptops from work but I hate them with a burning passion and I can't afford to replace my Macbook.

If someone can tell me what linux distro is the most silent and least annoying I will erase my entire Windows partition this weekend.

26 comments

They don’t have that feature out of the box but I bet you could configure them to do so. I’m sure there’s a “randomly beep and turn on in the middle of the night” lib somewhere.
Erase it. Join us.
Maybe I am missing something, but why not just shut down the machine for the night?
- I've changed some of my habits but it would be ideal if I wasn't always trying to outfox the computer. It's a laptop, so for me that means it is on on most of the time and plugged into a dock. I'm a night owl too so I end the day with lots of stuff open and plans to keep going in the morning, I'd rather not shut down. I also struggle with my mood and often little things that seem easy can feel like a lot. I like my IT to be low maintenance.
I don't want it to wake up in the middle of the night for no reason.
What Windows have been doing the last couple years is they moved from regular sleep to some poorly implemented standby mode that works more like a phone does where it still runs just very power efficiently and still does stuff in the background. Macs have been doing that for a long time except they actually did it right so it doesn't suck.
Linux doesn't support it yet so you'll get classic stop the world sleep anyway, but either way it'll always be customizable even when connected sleep gets implemented.
- I know I'm showing my age with this comment, but when I don't use my computer, I turn it off.
  
  Difference with laptops and desktops.
  Work laptops I almost never turn off. Hibernation is better because being able to save 10 minutes getting everything set back up is valuable.
  Desktop gets turned off when I plan to not use it for a while.
  Server is always on except for updates.
  
  Under Windows, I never wanted to shut it down because it took forever to both shut down and boot back up, so I used the sleep function. But I'm definitely old enough to have grown up with the habit of turning off the computer when I'm done.
  That same laptop running Linux gets shut down when I'm done using it for the night because it's just so much faster, and it applies the automatic updates my distro uses - painlessly. Why are Windows updates so terrible?
- Windows 95 had sleep mode and hibernation. Sleep mode, then as today, writes the system state to RAM, then shuts down power to everything but the RAM. Hibernation works in a similar way, except the system state is written to disk, then the computer is powered completely off. There's no "do stuff in the background" mode.
  
  Yes there is, "Modern Standby"/S0ix/S2idle.
  The CPU is still in a sleep state but less deep than regular S3 suspend, and it can wake up much frequently and silently to do stuff like check emails or whatever.
  See "Suspend to idle" : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate
If it's truly in a sleep mode, and you don't have Wake-on-LAN enabled, no distro that I'm aware of will wake itself and make noise.
But the belts-and-suspenders solution is to make a cron job that mutes the audio devices in the evening, and unmutes it in the morning. Depending on your cron subsystem and configuration, this will work even if the laptop is asleep at the trigger times; some cron systems guarantee execution of events - systemd is one of them, and is the most likely one you'll encounter.
But, seriously: if you put Linux to sleep, it stays asleep; you have to work to get it to wake itself up to do things, and it usually requires some external trigger.
I think others have already covered linux being silent if you want it to be.
I just want to acknowledge your headline, which made wonder if someone had named their newborn baby "Linux". Thanks for the laugh. :)
- You just know someone probably has named their kid "Linux" 😅
Any distro can do this. However the "user friendly" ones would tend to be the worst about it. Wanting to beep boop to get your attention for updates etc. I won't say which distro I use "by the way". But with Linux you are the admin. You own the system. You can disable noisy update notifiers or things that would wake the system. I had an HP elite book with garuda on it. I accidentally left it on and "charging" for several days. Thought it was unplugged and off. Didn't show any signs of life till I dropped something on the KB.
Give it a try, used to be that people struggled to get Linux to make sound at all 😅
I don't think most minimal distributions or big ones default to having sound but it has been a while since I tried many distros
They should go to sleep and stay asleep
I think you should be able to disable notification sounds on pretty much any distro and desktop environment out there. For example I use Fedora with KDE and you can just open up System Sounds and uncheck "Enable Notification Sounds" and it'll just be quiet.
As for waking up from sleep randomly, I never noticed it wake from sleep randomly. I vaguely remember it doing that when I had Windows installed on it a few times.
A new Linux OS may emit unfamiliar sounds if some network app is still running and set to use them for notifications. Quitting the (sound-making) app(s) and/or the network connection will can avoid that problem. Of course you can just turn the sound volume all the way down.
Suspended OSs may sometimes 'wake up for no reason' if some vibration causes the mouse, for example, to jiggle around enough.
Logging out of your user account before suspending/sleeping the machine will stop that stuff without having to dig thru settings. Faster to log back in than to reboot.
are you perhaps asking to disable the connect/disconnect jingle? As that can easily be done under the audio system settings > notification in KDE
not sure if this is what you're asking for
- the problem is intermittent but yes that's basically what I'd do.
  I am liking the sound of being admin of the PC. I like that. I only have surface laptops though and am less encouraged by the setup of that. Also.. I forgot that I use Sketchup regularly so will need to keep my windows partition.
Most laptops have a “mute” button.
Does that stop the sounds?

26 comments