It's not about security. It's about maintaining a network connection so you can stream Spotify and receive Facebook updates while it's "sleeping". It's fucking stupid.
Yeah. In the Backblaze data, you can see that annualized failure rates vary significantly by drive model within the same manufacturer.
But if maintaining drive diversity isn't your thing, just buy a cold spare and swap it out when a failure inevitably happens (and then replace the spare).
Someone should inform whoever made that change. If a package is split in a new release, the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically. (Although I'm not sure why they'd want to split everything out like that anyway; no other VLC distribution does that, so splitting is itself a violation.)
Maybe Manjaro might be an alternative? I haven't personally used it. I don't like this kind of surprise, so I stick to boring distros like Debian. I used to use CentOS but it was too boring.
The problem is it's not stupid simple, it's actually fairly complicated. Each piece of hardware and its driver must be suspended. The GPU is a particularly tricky one. Its processor must be suspended, and the state saved. In the kernel, the driver must suspend its execution, and likewise save its state. Then on resume, each half has to reload and begin execution again. And if there's any mismatch in the resumed states, the GPU and/or driver crash and probably take the kernel with it.
Now do that for the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sound card, USB, disk controller, and every other device.
It's not about security. It's about maintaining a network connection so you can stream Spotify and receive Facebook updates while it's "sleeping". It's fucking stupid.