I hadn't heard about hybrid suspend until reading this article at WebUPD8.org. I'd used the standard sleep mode most of the time. I enabled hibernate on my laptop as I mentioned here.
This hybrid sleep is pretty great. I put the laptop to sleep normally, either by command or closing the lid while unplugged from power. After 15 minutes by default the laptop will go into hibernation, saving battery power.
Some comments on the original post have mentioned there could be a risk if you have a traditional hard drive versus SSD. This could indeed cause an issue if your laptop is moving (in a bad, under an arm, etc.) while it transitions into hibernation mode. Use at your own risk.
Also, you must have a swap partition of sufficient size. If you followed the default at install you're probably safe. If you opted for no swap (a mistake in my opinion) this will not work.
Here are the steps, paraphrased from WebUPD8.org:
From the CLI, execute:
sudo pm-is-supported --suspend-hybrid && echo "hybrid suspend is supported" || echo "your system doesn't support hybrid suspend"
Depending on how the command returns you can proceed.
You need to create a file as root called
/etc/pm/config.d/00-use-suspend-hybrid
Here's what you need to put in it:
# Always use suspend_hybrid instead of suspend
if [ "$METHOD" = "suspend" ]; then
METHOD=suspend_hybrid
fi
# time in seconds until hibernate (suspend to disk) occurs; 900 means 15 minutes
# Edit this value to your preferred delay
PM_HIBERNATE_DELAY=900
And that's it! If your laptop doesn't support hibernation at all this will not work.
Some folks in the comments thread mentioned a risk of overheating, but I'm skeptical that there is any real concern there.
Let me know how it goes for you!