Can you describe the issues that you had with these things?
For brightness... is the problem that there are special keys or buttons that don't work for these functions, or is the problem that it shows that you are adjusting the brightness but it is not actually changing? If it is just a problem with keys or buttons not working, you may be able to map some key combination to adjust the brightness... more research may be necessary however
Also please elaborate on the issues with 'suspend/hibernate' ... I often have problems with 'hibernate' functionality (ie, not properly restoring previous after turning off) using various distributions of GNU/Linux... to the point where I just do without that feature :) It is probably my own fault and not a problem with the distros, and admittedly it is a feature that I am not very motivated to spend time getting to work for myself. In any case though, one thing that you may want to make sure of is that you have created a swap partition that is large enough to fit the contents of your RAM... I'm not sure if that is still how they do things, but IIRC when the OS hibernates it serializes the contents of RAM to a swap partition and restores from there when it boots up. If true, it would stand to reason that you may need at least as much swap space as you have physical RAM. I could be totally wrong about how that mechanism works though.
Suspend seems like another story... I almost never have problems with suspend... I would have the same question as about the brightness though... is it a problem with the power button on your laptop, or does it not properly suspend even if you initiate it from the 'Power Off' menu? And what is the nature of the problematic behavior that you see?
Don't give up BTW, and don't feel like a quitter. You need to work with the resources that you have. At work for instance I have to use non-free software that I hate, but at the same time I also need to buy food and other things to live. You can bet though that unless I am getting paid to do otherwise, I use free software for all of my computing. You may wish to take a similar approach... dual boot with Trisquel and Ubuntu if necessary... but use Trisquel for everything unless there is some task that you simply can't get done without Ubuntu or whatever.
