I have Linux on all my servers, was an early (very minor) dev on pre-1 kernel and generally love it.
The desktop is a walking nightmare. Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc.
I really would like to move (we use Outlook but I am even ready to go for OWA) but Windows is considerably better on laptops.
Again, I love Linux and have managed literally thousands of them since 1994.
To suspend, I just run "xlock & loginctl suspend" from a script being called from a Fluxbox submenu. Dumb easy.
& = puts xlock in the background so the shell can continue parsing commands without waiting for xlock to finish.
loginctl = sends the command on the right to the login manager.
suspend = self-explanatory.
Thus, upon waking up from suspend, your machine is still locked up by xlock. Simple.