I am fed up, I've had it with Neon. - multi-monitor and suspend/resume issues

[oshunluvr]

If I remember correctly Neon first had KDE 5.6. It certainly feels like 2 years ago.

LOL, I can see that...

I'm ready to try another release/distro/whatever. I realise the interactions between KDE and the Kernel suspend/resume code is complicated, and further complicated by all the hardware permutations. I'm sure Neon may well work better with other hardware but this is what I have.

For sure on all counts. I've had all kids of ACPI/APCI issues in the past that only eventual kernel updates solved after months of struggle. I have the blessing of having upgraded my hardware recently so none of those problems exist (at least for now). I could be a simple BIOS vs KERNEL issue. You know you can manually install 4.10 in KDEneon? It's in the repos, just not automatically dragged in by updating. Might be worth a try. Note that not all the needed packages will come in with the image, so you have to install all these to get everything:

ilinux-cloud-tools-4.10.0-27-generic 
linux-headers-4.10.0-27 
linux-headers-4.10.0-27-generic 
linux-hwe-cloud-tools-4.10.0-27 
linux-hwe-tools-4.10.0-27 
linux-image-4.10.0-27-generic 
linux-image-extra-4.10.0-27-generic 
linux-tools-4.10.0-27-generic

Which reminds my that I had some issues when I first installed KDEneon because "image-extra" wasn't installed. Might check that too.

Speaking of which, I may be in the market for a new laptop within the next 6 months so recommendations about what to look out for in terms of chipsets, etc to guarantee a smooth experience would be awesome. The Gigabyte P47G series with HDMI, dual mini display port, 32GB ram support and a not-too-awful keyboard has got my attention.

That looks like a well spec'd machine. Folks are buying the System76 units too since they come with Ubuntu installed, but they might be pricier.

Do I want to abandon the Debian side to go Arch? It depends on how much of a learning curve it is going to be - I find that I have less and less time to learn operating system nuances due to demanding projects. Manjaro has got a nice ring to it though. If it ends up working better it may just as well be a different compiler option somewhere in the kernel. Next week will be interesting.

Yeah, it's different alright. I booted it live for a look-see when I was trouble-shooting my audio-via-HDMI with nVidia driver issue. It runs very nicely and the installer utilizes btrfs with subvolumes when installing so I installed it twice - both fee and non-free versions - just to play with it. I really love the package manager and it's been rock-solid for the few hours I've played with it. It was very smooth install-wise and I've only had to add a few things to it since then.

At any rate thank you for your response.

That's why we're here

[Tahaan]

If I remember correctly Neon first had KDE 5.6. It certainly feels like 2 years ago.

I'm ready to try another release/distro/whatever. I realise the interactions between KDE and the Kernel suspend/resume code is complicated, and further complicated by all the hardware permutations. I'm sure Neon may well work better with other hardware but this is what I have.

Speaking of which, I may be in the market for a new laptop within the next 6 months so recommendations about what to look out for in terms of chipsets, etc to guarantee a smooth experience would be awesome. The Gigabyte P47G series with HDMI, dual mini display port, 32GB ram support and a not-too-awful keyboard has got my attention.

Do I want to abandon the Debian side to go Arch? It depends on how much of a learning curve it is going to be - I find that I have less and less time to learn operating system nuances due to demanding projects. Manjaro has got a nice ring to it though. If it ends up working better it may just as well be a different compiler option somewhere in the kernel. Next week will be interesting.

At any rate thank you for your response.

[oshunluvr]

I had no idea Neon was more than a year or so old, but I can hear your frustration. Honestly, I a brief web search doesn't reveal a large number of people complaining about this. No offence, but you've given nothing here that points to the Neon repository as the problem. For example AFAIK, sleep/resume functions aren't part of Plasma, that would be a core problem and the core of KDEneon is Ubuntu. On the other hand, I don't use a laptop with Neon so I can't say for sure one way or another.

Admittedly, lots of folks are/were having multi-screen issues but there are usually ways to solve those - automatic scripts and the like. In my case, it was to simply disable kscreen2 in background services and it stopped randomly swapping my monitors - again though, on a desktop not a laptop.

If you want to try a different distro using Plasma 5, try Manjaro. I installed Manjaro KDE Edition (17.0.2) along side my current Neon install and it works really well. I went with the "free" version rather than "non-free" because I have not yet been able to get my nVidia card to produce sound over HDMI/DP unless I use the nouveau driver. It's Arch based so there's a lot of differences, but it installed flawlessly and works very well out-of-the-box.

Otherwise, you could try addressing and trouble-shooting your issues directly. Good luck to you whichever way you go...

[Tahaan]

I've stuck with Neon for about 2 years.

It is not worth it.

10% of the times when I resume I have to hard reset my computer.
1 in 5 of those times I need to pull the battery to get my computer to respond (this is a new issue since April, though I had similar issues 2 years ago when I started with Neon).
I get a black screen (but can see everything seems to be working based on disk activity) about 25% of the time when I resume from sleep (this only happens when I resume without the external screen attached. This requires me to force a power-off and reboot.
33% of the times I need to tell Neon where the external screen goes (on the right of my laptop). This is a new problem since April, but used to be a daily problem 2 years ago until some update fixed it.

When these things are combined I have issues on more than half of my resumes from suspend.

I am looking for a replacement D.E. What a pity because other than the external screen related resume-from-suspect issues I have no problems.

I very much prefer KDE of Gnome/Gnome derivatives... but I need multi-monitor and suspend/resume to work well, consistently.