Comment 67 for bug 812394

@Jordan P: The hibernate option was turned off by default because of problems associated with it. I don't know why Canonical did not give a simple GUI option to turn it on, but I would imagine that it is precisely because only "advanced" users should do so.

Your answer to your friend could quite simply have been, "There are problems with hibernation partly due to new security procedures and partly due to hardware problems, and it has been disabled as a result." You don't want to tell him about the system folder and cut-and-paste, unless he is sufficiently advanced to cope with any resulting problems — in which case, he wouldn't think you crazy anyway!