They should go to sleep and stay asleep

I think others have already covered linux being silent if you want it to be.

I just want to acknowledge your headline, which made wonder if someone had named their newborn baby "Linux". Thanks for the laugh. :)

If it's truly in a sleep mode, and you don't have Wake-on-LAN enabled, no distro that I'm aware of will wake itself and make noise.

But the belts-and-suspenders solution is to make a cron job that mutes the audio devices in the evening, and unmutes it in the morning. Depending on your cron subsystem and configuration, this will work even if the laptop is asleep at the trigger times; some cron systems guarantee execution of events - systemd is one of them, and is the most likely one you'll encounter.

But, seriously: if you put Linux to sleep, it stays asleep; you have to work to get it to wake itself up to do things, and it usually requires some external trigger.

It's linux, so basically anything it does that you don't like you can learn to fix yourself. I'd shy away from Gnome (because they like you to have less control, or, less easily anyway), maybe try FrdoraKDE or Mint, popular distros with lots of help online.

If you have "an infinite supply of windows laptops" I'd pick a thinkpad that isn't your main and try it out on that, what do you have to lose? You'll still have your main untouched (until you see the glory of linux and install different distros on all of those laptops, but that'll come later..)

are you perhaps asking to disable the connect/disconnect jingle? As that can easily be done under the audio system settings > notification in KDE

not sure if this is what you're asking for

They don’t have that feature out of the box but I bet you could configure them to do so. I’m sure there’s a “randomly beep and turn on in the middle of the night” lib somewhere.

Erase it. Join us.

Maybe I am missing something, but why not just shut down the machine for the night?

I don't want it to wake up in the middle of the night for no reason.

What Windows have been doing the last couple years is they moved from regular sleep to some poorly implemented standby mode that works more like a phone does where it still runs just very power efficiently and still does stuff in the background. Macs have been doing that for a long time except they actually did it right so it doesn't suck.

Linux doesn't support it yet so you'll get classic stop the world sleep anyway, but either way it'll always be customizable even when connected sleep gets implemented.

A new Linux OS may emit unfamiliar sounds if some network app is still running and set to use them for notifications. Quitting the (sound-making) app(s) and/or the network connection will can avoid that problem. Of course you can just turn the sound volume all the way down.

Suspended OSs may sometimes 'wake up for no reason' if some vibration causes the mouse, for example, to jiggle around enough.

Logging out of your user account before suspending/sleeping the machine will stop that stuff without having to dig thru settings. Faster to log back in than to reboot.

I think you should be able to disable notification sounds on pretty much any distro and desktop environment out there. For example I use Fedora with KDE and you can just open up System Sounds and uncheck "Enable Notification Sounds" and it'll just be quiet.

As for waking up from sleep randomly, I never noticed it wake from sleep randomly. I vaguely remember it doing that when I had Windows installed on it a few times.

Give it a try, used to be that people struggled to get Linux to make sound at all 😅

I don't think most minimal distributions or big ones default to having sound but it has been a while since I tried many distros

Any distro can do this. However the "user friendly" ones would tend to be the worst about it. Wanting to beep boop to get your attention for updates etc. I won't say which distro I use "by the way". But with Linux you are the admin. You own the system. You can disable noisy update notifiers or things that would wake the system. I had an HP elite book with garuda on it. I accidentally left it on and "charging" for several days. Thought it was unplugged and off. Didn't show any signs of life till I dropped something on the KB.

I'm sure most distros don't have sounds on by default and whatever sounds there are can easily be disabled.

Try Linux Mint. It's a very solid starting point for beginners.