Owners of Valve's Steam Deck have praised its sleep mode since the handheld first shipped to customers, and for good reason. The Steam Deck's sleep mode works differently from most other gaming handhelds and consoles, giving it another edge over the competition.

However, the Steam Deck's sleep mode would be a fantastic addition to any Windows or Linux device, and really should become a more standard feature across most product lines.

How it works

What makes the Steam Deck's sleep mode so unique?

The Steam Deck's sleep mode includes system-level suspend, which saves the current state of the system, including your game, to RAM and stops handling any processing. This allows you to turn the Deck off in the middle of a game and resume directly where you left off when you wake the device. No logging back into the game or launching from the Steam library is required. Essentially, like you never turned the Steam Deck off to begin with. This way, you don't need to worry about manual saves or waiting for your game to boot up every time you take it out for a short gaming session.

This also means you can have multiple games running at once, with one game in suspension while the other is actively being played. Though that does come with a performance hit.

A few gaming handhelds offer a feature exactly like this. Nintendo's Switch and Switch 2 handhelds will put a game in suspension while in sleep mode, as did some handheld consoles in the past such as the PSP or Nintendo DS. However, modern PC-based gaming handhelds don't do this.

It's useful for more than just gaming

Just like the deck itself

Much like the Steam Deck itself, the handheld's sleep mode can be useful for other applications. Not only can you run note-taking software like Obsidian on a Steam Deck, you can also run Android TV on a Deck or use it as a set of portable speakers for your phone.

And the Deck's instant resume sleep mode can be a lifesaver when using the handheld in place of a desktop PC. After all, the Steam Deck's suspend-to-RAM feature works with any program. So you can resume your Android TV, VLC stream, or Obsidian note-taking right where you left off without a long boot or wake process, unlike standard laptop or desktop sleep modes.

And since the Deck's sleep mode doesn't require much in the way of CPU power, it takes far less battery to keep a game or program in suspend. This gives the Steam Deck a slight advantage over the Windows sleep process and makes it a more useful substitute for a laptop than a Windows-based handheld, especially given the Steam Deck's reliability and preservation of the system. How many times have you tried to sleep a Windows machine with a game running, only to find it either won't go to sleep at all, or randomly wakes up?

Steam Deck Sleep Mode drawbacks

There's always a downside

The Steam Deck's custom operating system is based on the Arch Linux distro with the KDE Plasma desktop. This makes its suspend/resume behavior robust enough for most applications and games, but there are a few key drawbacks to the Steam Deck's sleep mode.

Because the level-suspend feature is built into the OS, it is generally reliable. However, some programs and applications may experience bugs or performance issues after resuming, leading to unresponsive scrolling controls. This can usually be solved by restarting the application, but that defeats the purpose of sleep mode.

Some games or applications also require a persistent internet connection. Sleep mode often interferes with this connection, which may cause the game or application to lose connection during suspend. Online games like MMOs or competitive PvP titles are the most likely to have issues with this, but it also applies to non-gaming programs like video streaming services. Of course, this would be a problem even if sleep mode worked like it does on Windows.

More importantly, because the Steam Deck's sleep mode works the way it does, it won't download a game or file while in sleep. Granted, this is true of just about any operating system, so it isn't unique to the Steam Deck. It does mean that you'll want to leave the deck powered on with the display off while downloading large files, however.

We need better Sleep Modes overall

Especially on Windows devices

Technically, Windows supports suspend-to-RAM (S3) or Modern Standby (S0) sleep states. However, the Windows sleep mode is buggy and isn't optimized for gaming. So not only does Windows sleep sometimes result in a bug where your device won't wake from sleep and needs to be restarted, it can also drain more battery in sleep mode. Windows sleep mode sometimes causes a device to wake unexpectedly or fail to sleep in the first place.

The Steam Deck's sleep mode is far more reliable and is optimized for gaming, so you won't have to restart your game when waking your Steam Deck from sleep. And that kind of reliability is an absolute lifesaver, even just for general productivity tasks.

If Windows can offer an optimized sleep mode at least for handhelds, that would be ideal. But really, we need better sleep modes across all Windows devices—from tablets to desktops—because the existing feature just doesn't cut it.