Steam Machines won’t have a “suspend” function

One of the most underrated features of the latest generation of consoles is the abiltiy to "suspend" the console rather than turning it off completely. Both the Xbox One (since launch) and PS4 (since March) let users put the system into a low-power "rest" mode that provides for a much quicker startup when getting back into the suspended game, saving up to 30 seconds (or more) each time you start up.

It looks like Valve has given up trying to imitate this feature on its upcoming line of SteamOS-powered Steam Machine consoles, though. In a Github bug report thread, a Valve engineer wrote this weekend that Linux's "suspend" function is "no longer supported" in current SteamOS builds. Asked why, the engineer responded that "given the state of hardware and software support throughout the graphics stack on Linux we didn't think we could make this reliable."

The problem seems to be rooted in issues with the way that Linux handles rediscovering hardware devices (like USB controllers) when waking up from sleep. Though some Linux users report never having these problems, others say that coming back from suspension can lead peripherals to become completely unresponsive or lead to conflicts in discerning between multiple devices.

That's not a huge deal when running Linux on servers that are supposed to run 24/7, but it's a pretty big problem for a computer-in-a-living-room-console like a Steam Machine. A Slashdot commenter goes into quite a bit more detail on the source of these problems—and why fixing them would require a lot of nitty-gritty tweaking across a number of separate sub-domains of Linux development.

Valve has apparently decided that fixing this issue is too big of a lift in developing its own version of Linux for the living room. That's a shame because it means Steam Machines will be missing an important feature of modern consoles and will need to go through a complete system startup every time you want to play. The length of that startup will depend on the specific hardware configurations of the various Steam Machines, but it will likely be longer than the 10 to 20 seconds it usually takes an Xbox One or PS4 to get from "suspend" and back into gameplay (depending on the system and game state).