Suspend / Resume: I've had this Lenovo Ideapad Z360 for maybe most of a year and it's been a little bit of a pain running Linux. The kernel support for suspend/resume functionality has been buggy, meaning about 1/3 of the time suspending the laptop would put it into a battery-sucking catatonic state forcing me to power it down, losing any running programs. What a pain. In the year 2011, people don't close programs and shutdown laptops when they are done using it. Except for me. Until Ubuntu 11.10, that is, which ships with the fresh-off-the-git-repo Linux 3.0 kernel. UPDATE: Just kidding. In accordance with Murphy's Law, suspending the laptop failed after I wrote this post.

Backlight Control: Another issue with this laptop is backlight control. It doesn't work, out of the box. Fortunately, you can easily remedy this by adding a boot parameter of "acpi_backlight=vendor". Read more about how to do that here.

Turning Off Screen: OK, I've got bad news. For me, when the screen gets turned off when the laptop is not being used, it doesn't turn back on. It does turn back on when resuming from suspended state, but not just the normal power-saving functionality of having the screen turn off after a period of non-use. It is easy enough to disable this functionality. Open the Screen configuration program, and set "Turn off after:" to "Never". In the Power settings, I have it set to suspend after a period of disuse when not plugged in. This saves more power than just turning off the screen anyways. When the laptop is plugged in, I don't really want the screen to turn off anyways, since I might be watching Hulu.

Upgrading 11.04 to 11.10: Bad news: it takes a long time (but you already knew that). Good news: nothing broke. Let me repeat that: Nothing. Broke. OK, you get it. Of course, this is just my experience, yours may be different. I even upgraded my desktop workstation at work. When it got to the end of the install and required a reboot, I paused my VirtualBox VM's, rebooted, fired up the VM's and kept working like nothing had happened. The only annoyance was that the system default monospace font got set to something ugly, which made the terminal ugly until I changed the terminal settings to use a different monospace font.

Banshee: Still crashes periodically and silently. I like Banshee a lot, but I don't like that it randomly disappears. One second it's playing mp3's in the background, the next there's no music, no popup telling me the program has crashed, nothing. It's not running at all. It's like the program decides to exit all on its own. When I reopen Banshee, there's no apology for crashing, it starts up like nothing weird happened. This happens about once every other day. It has happened to me once since the upgrade to 11.10, about 1 hour after the upgrade and reboot. I understand that Banshee is built on top of a lot of different libraries for decoding audio, reading tags, etc and that its stability relies in part on the stability of the underlying libraries, but I think they should put some effort into catching these segfaults and at least handling the crashes in such a way that I can collect information and submit a bug report.

Everything else: Works great. So far. I'll add other issues if I find them.