For the same reason turning off a screen in Android works in less than a second and doesn’t drain your battery in half an hour while modern standby still barely works in Linux: optimisations.
Android is made to cache and freeze processes when switching apps. The more RAM you have, the more apps can have ready to go in an instant. When an app gets swapped out to storage, it’s very clearly noticeable, and many apps don’t bother to store state either. The Android approach to slick multitasking is to open as many applications as can fit in RAM, which is why apps launch faster than many Linux applications, even on much faster SSDs.
RAM really isn’t that expensive, and the power savings of rarely ever initialising applications is worth it.
The Steam Deck does sleep very well, but as far as I know, it doesn’t do low-power background stuff while in sleep mode (Android does this for notifications, Windows will try to download updates, etc.).
I think the Deck uses classic S3 sleep rather than S0ix sleep.
For the same reason turning off a screen in Android works in less than a second and doesn’t drain your battery in half an hour while modern standby still barely works in Linux: optimisations.
Android is made to cache and freeze processes when switching apps. The more RAM you have, the more apps can have ready to go in an instant. When an app gets swapped out to storage, it’s very clearly noticeable, and many apps don’t bother to store state either. The Android approach to slick multitasking is to open as many applications as can fit in RAM, which is why apps launch faster than many Linux applications, even on much faster SSDs.
RAM really isn’t that expensive, and the power savings of rarely ever initialising applications is worth it.
Steam Deck likes to have a word
The Steam Deck does sleep very well, but as far as I know, it doesn’t do low-power background stuff while in sleep mode (Android does this for notifications, Windows will try to download updates, etc.).
I think the Deck uses classic S3 sleep rather than S0ix sleep.