PikaOS maybe too “hobby oriented” to expect “sleep stability”, but I understand most/all bugs to be debian or kde upstream ones. Is gnome still much better at stability? Is there a distribution that fixed sleep problems for you? open vs closed nvidia drivers?
Are there motherboard manufacturers that suck less at linux?
Before asking for another distro, you should figure out, what is the root cause of the trouble you observe. Usually sleep/wake up under Linux are highly hardware dependent. Even the SteamDeck, which has payed first level hardware support by Valve, has sometimes trouble waking up properly after sleep, at least in desktop mode. Good luck!
A problem with PikaOS is that the log files seem bad or I couldn’t find the right one. Lots of seemingly amateur errors in log (no permission for system to write to system) that don’t seem to lead to imminent crash. Log files don’t pick up having to hit power switch maybe.
My main question was the easy “did a distro switch solve sleep issues for anyone”? Maybe switch to Mint would at least have more google hits on solving issues? Someone downvoted the “switch to x11 graphics driver before sleep” try, and I’m losing patience on tracking it down as you suggest.
Not sure if it is applicable, but wouldn’t it be an option to use the Fedora Workstation Live CD, mount your swap partition into the live system and send it to sleep via SystemD?
This should give you feedback with a fairly recent kernel and Gnome has (at least for me) been the desktop option with the least amount of bugs I encountered.