Ubuntu hack
Getting the faffing auto-suspend feature working properly I use Ubuntu on all my computers and it always works 99% well. But there's always one minor issue that I could live with, were it not for my pathological perfectionism. On this one it's the auto-suspend, which just wasn't working at all. This computer lives in the living room and I don't like any noise pollution there, or the idea of pointlessly consuming power. I think the ethernet card was continuously keeping the machine awake, even if auto suspend was enabled in System Settings -> Power Management . Eventually I found a solution Add a startup program via Preferences -> Startup Applications Disable auto suspend Log out and back in again (or reboot) For the disabling of auto-suspend I actually just removed the power manager altogether with sudo apt remove mate-power-manager . If you're using gnome instead it's probably sudo apt remove gnome-power-manager . The one-line startup program was