Great Expectations – Let Down

My refurbished laptop Dell Latitude E6420 i7 – 8GiB RAM 256GB SSD dual boot ubuntu 16.04 with Win10-Pro – was wiped and replaced with Trisquel-mini LXDE. This was maxed out with software in attempts to break it or at least upset it. It was mostly used for video editing. I also have a daily use HP G60 with 3GiB RAM running Trisquel MATE. Both laptops have worked faultlessly for about 2 years as has my GrapheneOS Pixel phone.

I wiped the Dell Latitude E6420 i7 again and installed stock Manjaro Xfce fully updated. I have documented just how frugal my previous OS was with 112MiB RAM used at idle rising to 560MiB (7%) when playing a web page video with four tabs open with LibreOffice Writer and GIMP open and loaded, with File Manager and Printers open. With Manjaro this rises to 1800MiB (23%) or 1.8GiB. Okay; so I have RAM to spare for such light duties and it was not a Y-Tube video.

Sometimes my laptop boots to a black screen with a dead mouse and keyboard.
At times my laptop will freeze with a dead mouse and keyboard.

My laptop never recovers from Suspend or Hibernate again with a dead mouse and keyboard, screen showing dappled multicoloured squares.
Changing to Xfce4 screensaver did not help.

Is this a typical experience using Manjaro Xfce or is this typical of rolling release Arch? Do I presume it would be a waste of my time trying another Arch based distro – I presume they all advertise as being stable? Or is it that I have been used to total stability over the years even with XP-Pro; so this instability comes as a shock?

ps The Manjaro Team criticise Trisquel for; quote “Their kernel 4.15 is very old and outdated and no longer maintained.” Yet I find kernel 4.14 LTS Recommended is used in my stock installation of Manjaro XFCE…! Perhaps this is the cause of Manjaro’s instability?

Too many things to go through here … but maybe I will just leave a link to the official linux kernel page for the last note?

kernel.org

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Please open a #support topic with what you need help with containing system information and logs so others can help.

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