problem has been solved by upgrading to Ascii.
The energy consumption on battery seems quite similar, so my previous observation might have been wrong.

Suspend on Devuan Jessie XFCE4 did not work on the T400 when closing the laptop-lid, but only when evoking suspension through the power button or by typing "pm-suspend" in terminal.

On Devuan Ascii however, the suspension also functions when closing the laptop-lid.

xfce4-power-manager --dump
---------------------------------------------------
       Xfce power manager version 1.4.1
With policykit support
With network manager support
---------------------------------------------------
Can suspend: True
Can hibernate: True
Authorised to suspend: True
Authorised to hibernate: True
Authorised to shutdown: True
Has battery: True
Has brightness panel: True
Has power button: True
Has hibernate button: True
Has sleep button: True
Has LID: True

on a Thinkpad T400 i installed Devuan Asciii and everything seemed to function just fine (Suspend, Trackpad etc)
however, upon launching *powertop* i noticed that on Battery there was a discharge around 20W which seemed way to high to me (for a Laptop with internal graphics only on a Centrino Duo CPU (P8400 or P8600).

Therefore i tried with with Devuan Jessie and interesting, the powertop now reports around 12W on reduced brightness which seems OK to me.

So i think on this laptop Devuan Jessie is a good solution;

Trackpad can be manually enabled with the help of Debian Wiki

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebia … Trackpoint

however, i noticed that the *Suspend* does not work out of the box, and even when i change the settings in XFCE (which were not setted to *suspend* upon closing lid), nothing happens.

Does someone know of a package i might miss to get this functionality back?

thank you very much.