Ubuntu is Debian anyway. Why not installing MX (based on Debian too) with XFCE, it is the best experience I have had.
I come from good old LFS from the 90s and for me, a distro is just a kernel with some GNU utils, a window manager, and a way to get packages (which is about the only diff between “distro”)
In Québec in 1998 during the ice storm, we missed power for 5 weeks. They derailled train to bring them at some place to plug their big diesel generators on the city power system.
Yes they were driving train on the asphalt road, I’m sure you can find pic and videos or it.
After using ext4 for yyyeeeaaaarrrrrsss, when I upgraded my MX21 to MX23 I used btrfs, with subvolumes, especially for easy backup/snapshot/timeshift.
Just at install, super easy, create a small ext4 boot partition on the SSD, then a big LUKS partition, format with btrfs, create subvolumes for / /home /var /swap and that’s it. No hassle with sizing correctly.
btrfs seems pretty stable. I see no diff in performance compared to ext4 because my application are not that dependant to FS speed, and with SSD anyway?
Hibernation or suspend? 2 different things. For hibernation you need a swap space at least the size of your RAM, and then the laptop is powered off after this.
For suspend, in your dmesg, see if you have:
ACPI: PM: (supports S0 S3 S4 S5)
if you have S3 your laptop should lost only a few percent.
do a:
cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
what does it says?
New CPU/BIOS/PC/Laptop only support something called “s0 idle” meaning it is like a cellphone, everything is running, and each drivers/components/os should enter low power themselves, if they do not, well, your battery is draining.
S3 means “suspend to RAM”, only RAM is powered and everything else is off, your laptop can stay like this for days. I don’t know who decided that this is bad and your laptop should be like your cellphone, always running?!?
LMDE, MX, Ubuntu etc are based on Debian. Mint is based on Ubuntu, so Debian. Chimera/Endeavour are based on Arch, etc.
In the linux world, you have a linux kernel, systemd or init, a bunch of gnu utils, a window system like X or Wayland, whatever DE you want (Xfce, gnome, kde, name it) and a packaging system (apt, yum, pacman), but for me, it’s all the same.
If you want something different, try a BSD distro then? FreeBSD, OpenBSD, GhostBSD, etc
In windows, save the recovery key (to an external USB key for instance), it is a text file. Then in Linux double click the partition in Thunar or your file manager and it will ask you for the key.