I'm having a power management problem that started with a clean install of Siduction 2013.2 (AMD64) with Xfce. I'm currently using the open source radeon driver, in case it matters. My system is up-to-date and running the 3.14-2 kernel.
No matter what settings I set in the Xfce power manager GUI, the laptop will always go into a suspend or hibernate mode (not sure which) whenever I close the lid. Even if I tell it to do nothing when the lid closes, it suspends anyway. Once it suspends, nothing will wake it: It's totally unresponsive to the keyboard, and hitting the power button tries to wake it, but the screen just flashes gray every once in a while. Even Alt+SysReq+RSEIUB doesn't work, and I have to physically power down the machine and reboot to get back to work. This is time-consuming and annoying for obvious reasons, and it's also probably bad for my hard drive.
I don't think it's a Linux hardware compatibility problem:
I previously used [an up-to-date] Siduction 2012.2 install with the MATE desktop (from the MATE developers' repositories), and the power management worked fine. The power manager obeyed the settings in the MATE GUI, and suspend/resume worked as expected. I ran into some unrelated problems a month ago that convinced me to do a clean install and give Xfce a chance, and that's when my power management problems started.
My Xfce power manager GUI settings are apparently being ignored, so that seems to indicate there might be a disconnect between the GUI and the actual system settings, but it still wouldn't explain why the machine won't wake. The problem might also have something to do with systemd, because I don't think my 2012.2 install ever used it (I could be wrong though). I've tried searching the forums and the Internet in general for Xfce power management problems, but I haven't found anything quite like this.
Does anyone else have this problem? If so, has anyone solved it? I can't imagine I'm the only one, but I haven't seen anyone here talking about it. Thanks for any insights!