Asus RoG gl552vw-dh74 halting problems opensuse

The gl552vw-dh74 has a hybrid video card in it (intel/nvidia) and finding drivers that worked at full resolution is problematic.

I initially started with opensuse 13.2 KDE live disc and that worked fine with the full resoluation 1920x1080. Installing from that got me 800x600 resolution. Poking at it over about a month when I had spare time, googling and whatnot I could occasionally get it up to 2048x1024 I think but it wouldn't last through reboots nor updates. After a while I was messing with something else on the box and bjorked it up and was doing a re-installation so I thought I'd just go ahead and try out Tumbleweed 13.3 and Leap 42.1.

First install of Leap 42.1 provided reliable consistent 1920x1080. I was quite happy. I started putting the few pieces of additional software on it that I needed and started using it. That's when the halting started. No log messages, no error messages, no indication of a problem other than the interface just not responding. Halting to the point where it wasn't even a pingable device.

Soooo.....very annoying. Googling around indicated nothing that was the same, but eventually I came across some indications that Plasma 5 had some halting problems. So I switched to Plasma Desktop. Both halted.

Doing various confounding issue reduction troubleshooting it seemed that it only happened when the system power management or screensaver kicked in. (I was rather stupidly testing battery life at the same time at first). So that sent me down some paths.

Adding acpi=off to the boot options made the laptop only capable of 800x600 resolution again. Taking it out restored 1920x1080.

seemed to work for a bit but that was apparently coincidence.

Opening firefox in safe mode and loading up a playlist of movies on youtube would generate a message saying something like "youtube has disable power management" and then it would happily sit there and play movies for however long I left it on (more than 12 hours).

Well! That certainly seems like a good lead, right!? Oh no...power management was turned off regardless of youtube playing.

Cross testing and power management still turned up nothing. No set of those options would keep the box from locking up.

Youtube did though. Oh...youtube in firefox with safe mode. Firefox, without any addons, would still sometimes crash the box.

So...no resolution yet, but I'm still digging in between work tasks.