It feels weird to just jump into a generic Linux community and ask a question. It’s nice being so small - kinda like the internet used to be.
Anyway, I’ve been running Linux servers for decades but only recently switched my desktop. I first tried Debian 12 and I’m now on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - I switched in the hope of getting newer drivers and maybe fixing this issue.
I have a HP laptop with onboard Intel graphics and an external monitor connected with USB-C. In general it works great - until it doesn’t. From time to time the external monitor does not wake up after a suspend. Normally turning the monitor off and back on will cause some sort of driver reset and it comes back. Once or twice this has not helped and I’ve had to reboot.
I’m running Xorg as Wayland on Tumbleweed won’t start on t his machine. Wayland may have worked with Debian, I don’t recall. I don’t think it’s worth listing details of my versions as it’s happened on two distros and through a couple of minor updates to Xorg on openSUSE. It happens with KDE or LXDE.
Any suggestions?
you’re running way too old a distro for what you want. debian 12 has its merits as a server, you install it and leave it be and it just works.
what you want - fluidity with power management, dock/undock, etc - although achievable with tweaking this and that isn’t being worked on, not on X, not on debian 12, so it’s not like those things will eventually get there. so you need a semi-modern distro, like ubuntu or fedora or even trixie.
wayland isn’t new, it’s default on a lot of distros since 2021 or so, so you can be sure that your use case was previosly met and solved. costs you nothing to boot e.g. F42 off a USB and try it out (has to be 42 as earlier live sessions default to X11). if you have lots of RAM, add the
rd.live.ram
switch so it copies the image to RAM and everything is super-snappy for testing and it doesn’t touch your SSD.