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.
Tbf the high ram usage wouldnt be a problem if it cached processes in it and used it to save battery but its just pure bloat. I think phones should have a coprocessor that handles notifications like what smartwatches do and that basically free battery. But android is also bloated because apps take a very long time to launch because of the jvm and java (thats what i heard at least, idk if this is actually why its slow) so everything is just left active. Also i think android strayed too far from linux, its basically just a worse version with a mobile ui and the support of a country sized company.
How did google manage to make a version of linux more bloated than windows? It’s almost impressive.
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.
iirc this is assisted by specialized hardware most computers dont have
AI bullshit.
And telemetry
Tbf the high ram usage wouldnt be a problem if it cached processes in it and used it to save battery but its just pure bloat. I think phones should have a coprocessor that handles notifications like what smartwatches do and that basically free battery. But android is also bloated because apps take a very long time to launch because of the jvm and java (thats what i heard at least, idk if this is actually why its slow) so everything is just left active. Also i think android strayed too far from linux, its basically just a worse version with a mobile ui and the support of a country sized company.