In his essay “The Cathe­dral and the Bazaar”, Eric S. Ray­mond coins the phrase “given enough eye­balls, all bugs are shal­low” — mean­ing that with enough testers and enough pro­gram­mers, it is pos­si­ble to diag­nose and fix any soft­ware bug.

So why can’t my com­puter sus­pend and resume properly?

The con­cept of ‘sus­pend’ — or ‘sleep’, or ‘standby’ — mode, whereby the com­puter dumps its inter­nal state to RAM then enters a low-power state with its proces­sor and other hard­ware turned off, is not new. The ACPI stan­dard has been kick­ing around for 14 years now, a very long time com­pared to the life cycle of an oper­at­ing sys­tem. These days, with lap­top use on the rise, it’s a very com­mon thing for users to want to do. And yet resum­ing from sus­pend is still hit-and-miss.

Why do I find it more reli­able in Ubuntu than open­SUSE for the same base ker­nel? Why does GNOME fare bet­ter than KDE? Why does my WiFi some­times not come back? Why, with Microsoft’s mil­lion– if not billion-dollar oper­at­ing sys­tem bud­gets, with Intel and AMD and nVidia’s decades’ of dri­ver expe­ri­ence, is sus­pend and resume still fre­quently an issue even on Windows?

Only Apple, with its closed hard­ware / soft­ware ecosys­tem, seems to have cracked it.

I’d hate to think of that as the only way to a bug-free exis­tence — I’m very fond of the idea of an open ecosys­tem where I can run what­ever soft­ware I want on what­ever hard­ware I want. But I’m wor­ried. Is the range of (IBM-compatible, ACPI-supporting) hard­ware out there just too diverse and too widely dif­fer­ent in its sup­port for suspend-and-resume? Is it just infea­si­ble for soft­ware to per­fectly imple­ment it on all devices?

Has hard­ware cre­ated the one soft­ware bug that, for any rea­son­able num­ber of eye­balls, isn’t shal­low?