Trisquel 7 - suspend issues

I can get T7 to suspend, but it cannot cope with resuming. Symptoms are - desktop is visible but everything other than the cursur is locked solid. No keyboard commands work, nothing is clickable.
I looked at the advice on the issue, tried a couple of of the quirks - no change. They all relate to video cards I don't have. On other distros the network connection (eth0 - wired) comes back up quickly. On Trisquel it doesn't. Not sure if that's related to the hangs, so I disconnected prior to suspending but the resume was the same as before.

For the record, also on this HD is Voyager Linux (a Xubuntu spin), it suspends and resumes perfectly as have slackware, ROSA, assorted manjaro's and elementaryOS. So it's not the hardware. I tried going back to the nouveau driver on Voyager to see if it was a video card issue, but suspend still worked fine.

So, I'm presuming this is the lack of a proprietary blob? From memory, when installing Debian on this box, I had to install the non-free firmware package. I downloaded the Ubuntu 14.04 firmware package but dpkg would not let me install it. I tried the command with --force-breaks and --force-conflicts but every time it complained about pre-existing firmware from the open-firmware packages and refused to install.

I had got into the habit of suspending the machine instead of powering it down as it's quicker when I come to power it back up again. I don't suppose it's a deal breaker, but it's annoying.
It's hard not to end up thinking 'if I have to put a proprietary blob on it to get proper functionality then where does that end? With the nvidia drivers? Flash?" And before I know it I'm back to where I am with other distros that come with all the proprietary stuff preinstalled and then what's the point in using Trisquel?
I suppose it just comes down to power it off instead of suspending it, but it's proper irritating.