Is there a useable distrobution for the pbp -- without wayland?

[RandB]

NetBSD will certainly run with X and without Wayland. In fact, it sounds like the perfect fit for you, except.... S3 Sleep (to RAM) does not yet work in NetBSD on the PBP. And suspend to disk doesn't work in NetBSD at all.

Thank you. I have downloaded NetBSD and will give it a go, probably on the weekend. I will try to get either sleep or suspend working. Also will need to get working hgmi output from the machine.

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Search the forum for STR (sleep to ram) or suspend, that is if you want LONG suspend

Thank you for the hints. What surprised me when I began reading the results of the searches is how soon after the problem gets solved this functionality seems to become flakey and mostly breaking again on the pbp after every upgrade. Why, after two years has reliably obtaining this basic functionality not been properly solved? I need to do more reading. (My pbp may yet be repurposed as a headless server with no need for sleep or hgmi output).

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While it's not necessary to use Wayland compositor on PBP, the performance difference is significant compared to X. Hardware architecture of GPU found on PBP (and other devices with Mali GPU) makes it really hard to perform well under X and that's unlikely to ever change. Note that it equally affects performance of X applications under Wayland (run with XWayland) -- they too perform poorly. So if your primary focus are X applications, there's not much of a benefit to go Wayland.

Agreed. While the performance difference with Wayland is significant, the performance with X is more than adequate for my purposes, which is mostly vim, latex, inscape, text browsers, zathura, plus qutebrowser and firefox.