Provide Choice of Suspend Method to Laptop Users

One of the main complaints of linux laptop users is the difficulty of suspending their machines. Both suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk can be difficult, confusing and unreliable, leading to data loss and frustration. This can be due to a variety of factors, but is usually a result of problems with power management in modules controlling hardware (especially video and usb).

The situation is complicated by the existence of three (!) separate methods for suspending to disk – swsusp (currently in mainline kernels and the Ubuntu choice); ususpend (a user-space suspend solution); and suspend2 (a third-party in-kernel solution originally intended for inclusion in the mainline kernel which still hopes to replace swsusp at somepoint). Though all of these methods share quite a lot of code, many users find that one method or another works better than the others on their particular hardware. For these users, installing their preferred method can be very frustrating on ubuntu. The power management infrastructure is both complicated and opaque (with several layers of scripts and config files), while the kernel customization method introduced in edgy is non-trivial and provides no obvious way to build restricted-modules packages for customized kernels.

Because laptop suspension is a more-or-less essential feature, improving the user experience around this issue would be a significant draw for many users. This spec suggests several ways by which the process of switching from the default swsusp method might be simplified.