I have run exclusively Linux and mostly on laptops for 15 years and it's been about 10 years since I have had problems with packages clashing, except for python pip. (I don't use python though)
It doesn't work well. I use my 2016 MBP with an external monitor and once a month or so I need to hard reboot it after sleeping because it gets confused and won't display anything on the internal screen.
My system76, with vanilla Ubuntu LTS does this perfectly for years. As did my thinkpad before this and the thinkpad before that. Always Ubuntu LTS, without big modifications.
The last time I had 'sleep' issues was with MySQL crashing when it woke up, and it found the os time changed without its internal clock moving forward. IIRC that was over ten years ago.
My main computer for last few years has been an Asus X305 laptop, using Ubuntu 14.04 with the i3 tiling window manager (i.e., there is no desktop). It's best computing environment I've had since I started out on a TRS-80 in 1979.
My i3 setup is not tweaked to auto-sleep on lid close. I'm sure it would have been easy to set up when I installed i3 back in 2015, since the sleep-on-close worked with Ubuntu's Unity desktop. Instead, when I installed i3 I attached sleep function to a hotkey, so before I close the lid I press the hotkey (if I want system to sleep). It is totally not a big deal. The system does autoresume when I open lid, which it also did in Unity environment. But if it didn't that would also not be a big deal.
To me the idea that someone would reject a superior system if it didn't auto-sleep (or auto-resume) on lid close/open is bizarre. I actually prefer to manually control with a hotkey.
My HP Pavilion laptop did this perfectly several years ago, at which point I didn't even know how "lucky" I was that it all worked. Fedora/KDE was the distro.
Can you give us details of laptop and distribution used? Seems hardware is still difficult i.e. trackpads, WiFi, screen resolution, external displays, etc.
I’m on an XPS 13 9370. I like the idea of a Thinkpad but I wanted a laptop that came sold with Linux hence the Dell.
So far hardware support seems pretty good. Not sure my Ubuntu 18.10 install is getting the most out of the GPU but everything works including Bluetooth audio and suspend.
The only issues I have are with the trackpad and the silly keyboard layout.
Trackpad: it’s small, a bit twitchy and not sensitive at the edges when moving inwards but is moving outwards. Driver issue I think.
Keyboard: who thought it was a good idea to split the left and right keys with PgUp and PgDown? Someone who doesn’t touch type would be my bet. The old layout was better.
I think of it as a replacement for an 11” MacBook Air as it’s about the same size but with a 13” screen and a quad-core i7.
Oh also, I got a 4K display and that was a mistake. Raw terminal text is tiny and Gnome currently doesn’t mix monitor resolutions very well. So dual screening with a 1440 monitor is not easy. Ordering again I’d get FHD instead.
I'm running the same laptop with Manjaro and do not have any trackpad issues. So either you're right and there is some driver issue on your system or maybe it's a hardware issue.
Only problem I've encountered so far is that if I unplug my usb/hdmi/ethernet hub while it's in standby then X crashes as soon as I wake it.
Curiously after you asked me this I also tested my trackpad a bit more and it turns out that if I go slowly from off the trackpad onto the trackpad it doesn't register the touch at all.
Not sure if that's some kind of feature intended to prevent accidental touches or a bug. Never noticed it before in my ~7 months of use.
I’m pretty sure it’s a software thing whatever it is because I don’t get the same behaviour in the BIOS pages. The trackpad is pretty choppy there for me but it is sensitive at the edges.
Thinkpads and Dell Latitude series (5xxx something). Currently Thinkpad X220 and L440. Wifi non-free drivers but in most distros, trackpad on L440 seems to recognise multiple finger use for scrolling &c. I admit that I tend to use at most one external display - projector - and that seems to work, I know that the newer hires external displays pose issues around scaling &c