HP Envy 17t-j000 laptop (4) (misc)

A few miscellaneous remarks and observations:

• The default marco window manager is working fine.  First time for me, but this is Mint 15 instead of the Mint 13 I've been using in the past.  I also gave compiz a quick try; it seems stable.
• Problems with hibernate.  About one time out of three, resume from hibernate fails with a hideous kernel stack trace.  I tried uswsusp; resume from s2disk always fails (hangs after displaying the 'splash').  Suspend (which is mostly what I use) seems OK.  I was a little surprised to see it resume from suspend if I close the lid and then open it again.  I guess I can live with just suspend.  This is actually pretty cool once I got used to it.  Use Power Management to configure On Battery Power -> When laptop lid is closed -> Suspend.  Then close the lid to suspend and open it to resume.  Still, I would like to get hibernate working so I could switch to Windows and back without losing my whole Linux session.
• Problems playing a DVD.  I got this working following RestrictedFormats/PlayingDVDs.  The two specific things I needed to do were to set a region on my DVD player using regionset, and to delete my old $HOME/.dvdcss.  To make vlc work, I need to use 'vlc -V x11'.  With volume turned up to 100%, it's borderline audible, but that seems to be true of all applications that use sound.
• Similar issues just playing a movie file.  Totem is fine.  vlc needs '-V x11'.  Audio volume is too low.
• The touchpad is awful.  By default there was no way to get a middle button click.  I was able to configure this as described here. 
• Just in case anyone is tempted to take the easy way out and just use Windows 8: German government warns key entities not to use Windows 8.
• Disregarding the warnings of the German government, I installed Steam on Windows 8 and downloaded a bunch of games I already was playing on Windows XP.  Everything seems to work OK.  Frustrating to see Windows 8 easily accessing the Nvidia GPU.