First bit of Linux trouble.. Any advice?

@AnotherDev perhaps you can offer some additional assistance. The steps for manjaro are very similar to the ones in your debian 9 stretch guide.

@ASimpleRadio, can you get us the exact error message in full? There could be a couple of different things happening at once that may or may not be causal to your system locking up. BTW, were you in a GUI when you returned from sleep and what gui was it?