Windows in particular is notorious as of late for brutally draining the battery while Sleeping[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c

I thought we were talking about just supporting going to stand-by, not about how much power the device draws while on stand-by.

Brutally draining the battery while aSleep should never be called "supporting Sleep".

And even before then Sleep was very hit-or-miss anyway. I've never used Sleep because it's just far too inconsistent and thus unreliable, compared to just shutting the thing down when I don't need it for a while.

Still, TFA is about putting a server on stand-by. A server is not going to run off a battery most of the time, so it's not very relevant if it's drawing 4 W instead of 1 W. Even if it's not running at the absolute minimum power level, by putting it on any stand-by mode it's going to draw an order of magnitude less power than if it's idle.

S3/S4 sleep works just fine after Windows XP. S0ix is difficult but only implemented on laptops.

I've had S3/4 derp on me enough times to write it all off as unusable.

I've had MacBooks running MacOS do excatly what you describe on a regular basis.

But it's not sleeping.

Same. At least not on desktop machines.

ah so you're a new windows user

The majority of Sleep/Suspend/Hibernate related issues I had on Windows were related to it either not sleeping at all, or waking up at the wrong time.

Annoying when it's a laptop that you've just unplugged and stuffed into your backpack, and you're wondering why there's now an oven on your back. Less fatal for a desktop when the goal is to save power.

For linux, sleep/suspend is also pretty reliably good in my experience.