So when lid is closed, OS doesnt suspend or takes long to suspend? The best way is to use journalctl. Close the lid, wait 2 - 5 mins, then open it up and check most recent journalctl messages. Hopefully that gives you some clues.

Now, are you dual booting Windows? Try to check Bios if your laptop has any funny settings for power. On Lenovo, there used to be something like “Power scheme for both Linux and Window” button…

Lastly, xfce4-power-manager app really is just a GUI for your core systemd services. So… as a test, can you not autostart it? Xfce has a setting for that. Or just remove it, you can easily install it back later.
Once youre done, reboot back and check:

1. Does closing the lid make the laptop to go into suspend mode? If yes, great. Test again to see if behavior is erratic, i.e. sometimes it takes 5 sec to suspend, sometimes it does not suspend at all…etc.

2. If above fail, try to run “systemctl suspend” to check if suspend really works on your system.

3. if 1) and 2) fail, you can play around with /etc/systemd/sleep.conf script. Maybe uncomment “AllowSuspend” or something similar…

the simplest answer would be: just try them all by yourself and see which one fits. Try only the popular ones btw, otherwise you’d have a hard time finding supports.

Word of advice: dont mind the aesthetics, but pay attention to stuff like package managers / packages and community. Here is what I meant:

• Unless you have special flavor from a distro like XFCE from Manjaro, any Linux distro can be made pretty. I can have Debian 12 on one computer and something like Arch on another, and I can still make both look exactly the same. So dont choose a distro just because it looks pretty, you can do that with any of them.

• Packages and package managers are so important, those are how you get software on Linux. Debian has a lot of softwares in its repos. Arch’s main repos do not have as much, but its AUR repos allow a lot of softwares to be installed.

Do you like apt, the manager for Ubuntu/Debian? Or do you prefer dnf, the manager for Fedora and RHEL? Package managers are more of a style really. I like Fedora’s dnf but Arch’s pacman is way faster.

• Community is also important. You dont want to pick a distro where only a handful of ppl use it. It would be very difficult to get supports. Ubuntu / Mint / Debians are so popular that you can get answers from any forum.

oh LibreOffice works great for me in general. Only for some documents with macros that were created in MS Office, I have problems running them. Eg: I once received a MS Word document that has some preprogrammed drop down list - so you click to extend the list and choose your items. The document opens fine, but I couldnt get the drop down feature to work. For Excel, documents with lots of VBA codes, I need to go in and do some manual changes.

In general, for 99% of the tasks, LibreOffice is fine. But it is that 1% which makes me still open up my Windows VM for MS Office.

After their shenanigan with subscription only models, we still see MS Office being used a lot. It shows how strong MS grips on the Office area is.

You are correct that 365 is used for most people. I used to use it too…For me, I prefer to be able to access stuff whenever I want. I live in an area with very shitty internet (both Wifi and 4G). Once, a client and I had to wait 5 minutes because Office Online takes too long to load up a spreadsheet. Offline for me is just a peace of mind.

LibreOffice better step up their games and make their office suites better. Outside of very niche and specialized applications like CAD or video editor, the average Joe will just need a good office suite to do stuff.

try Vivaldi.