Automatic Suspend freezes computer requiring a hard stop/restart (press/hold power button 15 seconds, wait, press power).
Latest Incident: Found my laptop overnight had attempted Automatic Suspend, displaying the warning message that the computer was about to suspend due to lack of activity. Other than displaying the bottom half of the home screen, plus a working mouse pointer, no other functionality existed; the CPU's were obviously topped out because the cooling fan was cranking on high.
Turned off Automatic Suspend.
2010 Gateway NV57H77u
Zorin 16.3, including latest updates
You have this listed in General Help.
Are you reporting this as a Feedback Issue or seeking a General Help solution (other than disabling automatic suspend)?
Does the terminal command
All my older 2009-2010 laptops prefer 4.8 - 4.18 kernels for suspend support (older Celeron, 1st gen i7, McBk Core2Duo, etc.). It may be related to GPU drivers, might not.. My old Toshiba Satellite hates Linux - any of it. Have tried so many distros on that system it's ridiculous.. Is Zorin the only version of Linux you have tried so far? One MacBook from 2009 I have works flawlessly on Mint MATE 21.2, 5.15.0-82 kernel. Cinnamon and xfce 21.1/2 versions would not suspend properly; and run the fan until the battery died. Neither 15 or 16/.2/.3 versions of Zorin would work.
Older devices, especially with specific HW - I always test suspend and other options on the live disk; if it doesn't work OOB, I move the the next distro, and so on, and so on. I would say if you can't get Zorin going, give Mint MATE a shot. I've had many more success stories with MATE distros than not.
My logic tells that a service or process is preventing the system to go in automatic suspension despite this mode has been triggered. Weird, usually if suspension or power-off procedure start it wouldn't be possible to make them hang or freeze. But I could stop my laptop with Windows 7 Starter once when I closed the laptop lid before shutdown procedure finished, the computer went in standby right some seconds before shutting down effectively, after opening the lid it finally shut down in a glance. I don't get the sense of pausing a procedure like shutdown just by closing the lid.
Most likely, some process is hanging, causing everything else to stop and wait on it.
Tediously, you could test which processes your normally run and narrow down which process is causing the issue.