The blame is shared between Microsoft and Intel. It's not really that Windows supports sleep modes that Linux doesn't, but that Microsoft and Intel conspired to

The blame is shared between Microsoft and Intel. It's not really that Windows supports sleep modes that Linux doesn't, but that Microsoft and Intel conspired to get rid of S3 sleep mode entirely. The intention was to replace S3 with fine-grained per-device sleep modes that would in aggregate lead to idle power that is almost as good as S3 while allowing for the "wake up and check email" kind of features. But to the surprise of approximately nobody, this complex multi-vendor strategy relying on high-quality drivers for every single peripheral in the machine did not work out as well as planned. The plan also did not in any way require that S3 sleep be eliminated from newer hardware platforms; that was just malicious behavior from the Wintel conspiracy.