An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro

[Damon]

Gnome crashes, and takes everything down with it.  It restarts fine, but everything is gone.  It seems to be related to saving files.

Hi, I was experiencing similar crashes that would blank the screen in GNOME, though I hadn't connected it to saving files. The PBP would still be avialable in SSH for awhile then not. Holding the power button to shutdown then restarting was the only way out. This was under the previous stable version of Manjaro when using Wayland, but it didn't happen under Xorg. And the 2020.4.17 stable update fixed it for me.

So if it also only happens for you under Wayland, that could mean one or more of the packages that were updated in Manjaro's 2020.4.17 update are what you need. I am using mesa-git and it got updated, as did Wayland.