Linux for Laptop

[Joom]

Fair enough, I was wrong and I take back my comment. I do apologize.
CRUX is one distro I've had on my list to test and yet continue to have hardware that has a hard time supporting it.
My last laptop was an AMD laptop and it would just fail to boot. So I tried everything and it would continued to fail. Even a few months back when the hardware was old and every distro under the sun was supporting it, it continued to fail for me.
Then tests on my Chromebook came back with mixed results. Often times the touchpad would fail on it or it would fail to boot.
I haven't tested it on my current laptop because the continued history of me failing with it has left me pretty burned out.
I had the same issues with Slackware as well.
I may just give it a try on my next day off though.

Chromebooks are notorious for having trackpad issues with all distributions. I've only fixed the driver on an Acer model, but I've read it happens to other models as well. It's a pain in the ass. Windows has an even worse time on them. Also, is your AMD laptop using an APU? Those tend to cause shitfests. I have an A6 machine that takes a good chunk of time to get everything working "properly". Catalyst doesn't work well at all with it, but the open source driver is much worse. I also have to setup a custom grub configuration just to get it to boot with a working trackpad and keyboard.

 

[The Catboy]

Chromebooks are notorious for having trackpad issues with all distributions. I've only fixed the driver on an Acer model, but I've read it happens to other models as well. It's a pain in the ass. Windows has an even worse time on them. Also, is your AMD laptop using an APU? Those tend to cause shitfests. I have an A6 machine that takes a good chunk of time to get everything working "properly". Catalyst doesn't work well at all with it, but the open source driver is much worse. I also have to setup a custom grub configuration just to get it to boot with a working trackpad and keyboard.

I actually helped push several distros to supporting the Acer C7, one being Chakra OS.
Windows just fails so hard on Chromebooks. Like no keyboard, no touchpad support.
My AMD is an A8 and it does use APU. Most distros seem to do alright with it, with spotty results. Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and openSUSE based distros work perfectly on it, but arch ones just suffer so hard. Like both Arch Linux clean and Manjaro work, but as soon as you lock the screen, the graphic drivers shit the bed (both free and non-free.) Chakra boots live, but fails to boot when installed. Mageia works ok, doesn't seem to care much for the GPU though.

 

[VinsCool]

My old laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad T-61) runs Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop, and it's just perfect.

I tried to run Linux on my Asus laptop (now back to Windows 10, like it always was running) and things never worked properly. Hopefully your laptop will run Linux fine

 

[Joom]

as soon as you lock the screen, the graphic drivers shit the bed (both free and non-free.)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Toshiba_Satellite_L775D_S7340#Hibernate.2FSuspend

I never had the screen flickering issue noted in that, but it did fix sleep. If you're talking about locking it with a DM (KDM, GDM, SLiM, etc.) then it may be the way you're invoking X. Proper xinitrc configuration to load the DM and environment of your choice is necessary to avoid a lot of problems like this. @dark_samus3 ran into something similar recently with his Arch install due to the way he was starting GNOME. Since he wasn't using GDM to invoke X, dbus wouldn't start properly which a lot of GNOME stuff relies on.