I’m writing a multi part series on my frustrations with Linux. While I have used Linux for a long time, I am still disappointed at the issues that pop up.
Part 1: — The Two Bugs That Broke My Linux Year
I sent my laptop off for a warrantied touchpad replacement. It is a Lenovo ThinkBook 16 G6 ABP with AMD Ryzen 7530U. While it was gone, I had the chance to dabble with distros on a slightly older ThinkBook 15 IIL with Intel i5 – 1035. It was my wife’s old laptop that I intended on selling. Luckily, I still had it as a backup for me.
My laptop finally came back from repair last month. They replaced the track pad and the keyboard too! So the trackpad works again, the chassis feels solid, and I made myself a promise: no more new laptops until this one dies. As a high school biology teacher and a father of five, I don’t have the time (or the budget) for another hardware expedition (I may have been browsing eBay for ThinkPads and Latitudes while it was gone).
The plan was simple:
Install Linux.
Have it work reliably.
Stop tinkering.
But if you’ve followed Hacking the Hike or any Linux site for any length of time, you already know how this story goes. The “Year of the Linux Desktop” is still somewhere on the trail ahead, and my ThinkBook seems determined to test every ounce of my patience.
Before we get into the distros, we need to talk about the two villains that defined this entire journey.
Villain #1: Brightness Amnesia (a.k.a. The Flashbang Bug)
This bug deserves its own campfire story.
On my ThinkBook 16, Linux has a habit of forgetting my brightness settings the moment the lid closes. The behavior is simple, predictable, and absolutely maddening:
– I set brightness to a comfortable 40 or 50%.
– I close the lid to suspend.
– I open it again.
– The system wakes… and instantly resets the screen to 100% maximum brightness.
It’s like being flash‑banged every time I resume from sleep.
This isn’t a GNOME problem or a KDE problem. It’s not a misconfigured setting. It’s a kernel level conflict between the amdgpu driver and the system’s ability to restore saved brightness states.
And it’s arguably worse than a broken slider because it pretends everything is fine until you open your laptop in a dark room and get blasted by 400 nits of regret.
This bug alone would be enough to derail a distro.
But then came the second villain.
Villain #2: The Suspend Freeze (a.k.a. The Big Freeze)
If the Flashbang Bug is annoying, the Suspend Freeze is catastrophic.
On certain kernels, my ThinkBook fails to enter s2idle sleep correctly. Instead of suspending, it gets stuck in a half‑dimmed, half‑alive limbo:
– The screen is darkened but still faintly visible
– The trackpad is dead
– The keyboard is dead
The only way out is a hard power off.
A laptop that resets brightness is irritating.
A laptop that crashes when you close the lid is unusable.
I can’t teach a class, grade papers, or run a household on a machine that might lock up if I step away for coffee.
Why These Two Bugs Matter
Most Linux issues are tolerable. These are not.
Brightness Amnesia fries your eyeballs. Suspend Freeze breaks your workflow.
Together, they turned my Linux journey into a survival story — one that felt less like a smooth trail and more like a scramble over loose shale.
What’s Next
In Part 2, I start with the obvious choice: Ubuntu 25.10 — the polished, mainstream distro that should have “just worked.”
Spoiler: it didn’t.
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