To be honest, Mint is no better in that regard on my laptop. Closing my laptop and pulling the power adapter always results in the system not going to sleep mode, but remaining active. Opening it will actually cause it to resume going to sleep. Really annoying.

Reminds me of the time I ran a FreeBSD webserver from home, compiling Apache from source took the better part of a day. But still good times, learned a lot from that experience.