Dell Inspiron 15 5505 - several weird issues - hanging boot, hanging shutdown, screen brightness, intermittent touchpad, pamac filters

Howdy all - I believe this might actually be the first time I’ve had to post a forum question on here since I have always been able to find my answers on here or the Arch Wiki. I have participated in forums for years and am somewhat familiar with etiquette, so I understand that the subject of this post is more verbose than normal and I apologize. I am hopeful that it is helpful to anyone else who might be having these problems.

To the meat of my problems, here is the machine that I just bought from eBay:

Output of hwinfo --short:

[paul@tinman ~]$ hwinfo --short
cpu:
AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics, 1400 MHz
AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics, 1397 MHz
AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics, 1400 MHz
AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics, 1400 MHz
AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics, 1400 MHz
AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics, 2000 MHz
AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics, 1400 MHz
AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon Graphics, 1400 MHz
keyboard:
/dev/input/event3 AT Translated Set 2 keyboard
mouse:
/dev/input/mice DELL0A1E:00 04F3:3147 Mouse
/dev/input/mice DELL0A1E:00 04F3:3147 Touchpad
/dev/input/mice ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad
monitor:
T1WD3 NV15N3D LCD Monitor
graphics card:
ATI Renoir
sound:
ATI Audio device
AMD Family 17h (Models 10h-1fh) HD Audio Controller
storage:
AMD FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
Silicon Motion Non-Volatile memory controller
AMD FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
network:
wlp2s0 Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200
network interface:
lo Loopback network interface
wlp2s0 Ethernet network interface
disk:
/dev/nvme0n1 Silicon Motion Disk
partition:
/dev/nvme0n1p1 Partition
/dev/nvme0n1p2 Partition
/dev/nvme0n1p3 Partition
/dev/nvme0n1p4 Partition
usb controller:
AMD Renoir USB 3.1
AMD Renoir USB 3.1
bios:
BIOS
bridge:
AMD Renoir PCIe Dummy Host Bridge
AMD Renoir Device 24: Function 3
AMD Renoir PCIe GPP Bridge
AMD Renoir Device 24: Function 1
AMD Renoir PCIe Dummy Host Bridge
AMD FCH LPC Bridge
AMD Renoir Device 24: Function 6
AMD Renoir Root Complex
AMD Renoir Internal PCIe GPP Bridge to Bus
AMD Renoir Device 24: Function 4
AMD Renoir Device 24: Function 2
AMD Renoir Device 24: Function 0
AMD Renoir PCIe GPP Bridge
AMD Renoir PCIe Dummy Host Bridge
AMD Renoir Device 24: Function 7
AMD Renoir Internal PCIe GPP Bridge to Bus
AMD Renoir Device 24: Function 5
hub:
Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
memory:
Main Memory
bluetooth:
Intel AX200 Bluetooth
unknown:
FPU
DMA controller
PIC
Keyboard controller
AMD Raven/Raven2/FireFlight/Renoir Audio Processor
AMD Renoir IOMMU
AMD Family 17h (Models 10h-1fh) Platform Security Processor
AMD FCH SMBus Controller
Realtek Integrated_Webcam_HD
Shenzhen Goodix Technology Co.,Ltd FingerPrint

And uname:

[paul@tinman ~]$ uname -a
Linux tinman 5.13.19-2-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Sep 19 21:31:53 UTC 2021 x86_64 GNU/Linux

The issues I am having I don’t know how they could be related, but someone more experienced than I might know what they have in common.

The most obvious and easy to explain is that the screen brightness is not saved upon reboot. It always resets to 100%. The error message on shutdown is :
[FAILED] Failed to start Load/Save Screen Backlight Brightness of backlight:acpi_video0

During the course of multiple reboots, I noticed that seemingly at random the touchpad would not work at all, no mouse movement nor tap to click.

I know for a fact that the laptop is not faulty since these functions all worked under windows before I wiped that crap off the hard drive. I prefer KDE, so I decided to test KDE Neon. The same issues occur under that one as well. (I’d also like to go on record as saying yuck!) Currently I am testing it with Manjaro Cinnamon and of course the same hardware issues are happening here.

The biggest headscratcher though is pamac. If search for a package or program that I know is in the repository or AUR but unsure of which, I have to manually click each section. The ALL view doesn’t work. Here is an example:
All view

Repository view

AUR view

Again - I apologize for the incredible long post and the someone unconnected issues. I would normally have one forum post per issue, but these all happened under each version I have used so I thught they might be related. Thank you in advance for any help or insight you guys may have!