Also check your bios version. I had similar problems with usb-c and fans on HP Elitebook, they were fixed with bios upgrade.

Edit: I also had troubles waking from sleep. They were caused by wwan/lte modem, I disabled it on bios and now sleep works flawlessly.

For first-time Linux users, I always recommend one of the main user friendly distributions - it is much easier to ask or look for help this way.

So, Fedora, Ubuntu or Opensuse.

Their installers all can live boot

Blog makes valid point, but why on earth there would be any current Linux distribution without usr merge?

EDIT: Especially when every major Linux distributions have already implemented usr merge long time ago.