> How’s ACPI and real suspend

On a current ThinkPad? Essentially perfect. Zero problems suspending and resuming, no matter what's going on, including weird cases like suspending while docked and resuming while undocked or vice versa.

Do current thinkpads still have real suspend? I thought it was discontinued by intel. And if they do, how do you enable it? I haven’t seen anything in the bios of my p14s g6

Current ThinkPads have working suspend out-of-the-box, including turning off or putting to sleep peripheral devices, waking on keypresses or lid opening, and otherwise handling suspend/resume exactly as expected.

Isn't that the "modern standby" thing? Mine (p14sg6 intel) "works well" in that it suspends, wakes, etc (under linux, don't use windows enough on it to have formed an opinion).

But it doesn't support S3 (suspend to ram), only s0ix:

    $ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
    [s2idle]

In both cases, the peripherals are put to sleep, and the RAM goes into self-refresh mode. The main difference is that if there are any bugs, they can be fixed in the OS rather than the BIOS.

I haven't tried this much on this Lenovo laptop, but on my HP ones, both Intel and AMD, the main difference I notice under Windows is that the laptop stays warm to the touch in this mode, whereas in S3 on older machines it used to go cold. Additionally, with both Linux and Windows, the battery drains much more quickly compared to the old S3 mode (even though on Linux it gets cold to the touch).

The HP Intel is the one I use Windows most often on (since sleep is basically borked on Windows on the AMD one), and on that machine, I actually hear the fans running while in standby (it wasn't actually fully on, judging by the LED pulsating instead of being continuously on). Which is absurd, since the fans are hardly ever audible under Linux in normal office use.

Sadly, this is what I thought. Nobody wants to open their backpack to find a warm helicopter

It's a toss up. Works great on my 2017 X1 Extreme. Doesn't work on old 4th Gen i3/i5 E550 thinkpads I refurbish, etc.

Dang :(

So what’s your opinion on the beefiest laptop money can buy (NVIDIA based for CUDA) that supports Linux the best?

I'd consider System76 in that case, I don't think their fit and finish is known for being top tier but the specs are pretty good. Also maybe framework? The thinkpads and dells are probably mostly fine, you can always return it if it doesn't work.