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My gear and what I was originally trying to acomplish
I have a ThinkPad T470s, which already gave me a few problems with their batteries and couldn't turn on at all, even with the power cable working properly. (More details here.)
I ended up removing both batteries and in the end everything went fine. I've kept using my T470s on the power cable only, with Linux Mint and Cinnamon DE. So far, so good.
One day I decided to make the jump from a desktop enviroment to a windows manager. Since I already had a short but good experience on a ThinkPad X230 Tablet, I installed i3.
Most of the stuff was working great. However, I found a few issues -- first, the laptop wouldn't suspend when closing the lid, second, the system would never enter into suspension mode after some time of inactivity, and third, it wouldn't be set up properly with an external display.
What did I do?
For the first issue, I found a thread like this, so I messed around in the /etc/systemd/logind.conf file, sudo nano it and tried changing some values. (As you'll see later, I'm not even sure I actually accomplished this.)
For the second issue I recall installing i3lock and I xautolock, then I followed some instructions online, did some experiments (like setting autosuspend to 1 minute and setting the i3lock default color to black, which I added as an alias to my basrhc file). Then I added another line to the the i3 config file, so it would run every time I logged in.
For the third issue, I installed 'arandr', set up my desired configuration and saved it. Once again, I added a line to the i3 config.
FWIW I also made some other custom arranges to my i3 config file for other minor issues.
This is what I mostly recollect doing before everything went downhill. Nothing dictates that the issue must be due to one of these changes, but these are some points that I consider might be relevant.
Also, please notice that I "soft-restarted" i3, with Super+Shift+R, several times. Everything was great during the day. At night, I turned the computer off.
The problem
The next morning I turned my laptop on but it wouldn't pass the Lenovo logo -- after displaying that, it would turn off. Then, weird enough, if I pressed or even held the power button, absolutely nothing would happen. In order to start the system again, I would have to unplug the power cable and connect it again. Only then the power button would turn the system on and reach the Lenovo logo, only to repeat the same story.
I've tried some stuff that I'll proceed to detail now. However, it's important to notice that the exact moment when the computer decides to automatically turn off keeps changing a bit randomly. Sometimes it will die when reaching the Lenovo logo, sometimes it will get past that and reach the Linux Mint logo and then die, sometimes it will amazingly reach the login screen, where I select the DE o WM and put my password, and once I do the latter, it will get into my desktop and then die 1 or 2 seconds later.
What I've tried
I pressed shift during startup and went into Linux Mint (Recovery Mode) and the shell as root.
Once in the terminal I checked /etc/systemd/logind.conf and this is what I saw:
First thing I noticed is that I was supposed to uncomment the lines that I wanted to change, which apparently I forgot doing the day before.
In any case, I followed the instructions in said file and sent it to the trash, hoping that, if that's what was broken, it would go back to the default values. I also did the same with other .conf files in the systemd folder, however nothing changed.
Once in the shell as root, I also modified the i3 config file and commented/disabled all the lines that I previously added, like the ones to load the i3lock and arandr configurations. Nothing changed neither, so I even went further and decided to remove that file entirely, but again, nothing happened.
I also decided to comment/disable the i3lock line that I previously added to my bashrc file. Same story.
Finally, I even flashed a USB thumbdrive with the latest version of Linux Mint, in order to boot from it, hopefully rescue some files and just remove everything and doing a clean install. However, after my computer boots up from that flashdrive and I select whether the normal or recovery modes, the computer will display a new tty and then die once again, with an also dead power button.
Please tell me what the hell could have gone wrong...
