I’d investigate the differences between the installs particularly around graphics and power management. It sounds like your system is getting woken up but it’s hanging at some stage in the process of resuming. You might get lucky and the issue might show up in the logs if you’re willing to investigate them.

When I’ve run NUCs in the past I’ve had issues with external nvidia GPUs dropping off the bus when resuming from suspend. To “fix” the issue, I ended up limiting the power state to S2 or S3 so that the graphics card was kept on the bus.

Do you know what display server, DE, power management service you were running on both? If the logs don’t turn anything up you can always compare the configs too to see how they’re suspending/waking the system.

OK, so this is one of those comments that's either "wtf, of course everyone knows that" or "oh shit, ok", but generally wake on USB is a bios setting. Have you looked around in the bios to see what your options are?

Doesn't explain the weird behaviour, but may be a good way forward.

Most of these troubleshooting steps will work in any distro, especially Debian:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate

This is no help, I know, but... OpenSuSE behaves weirdly. On my old laptop every distro would work, exception made for SuSE who wouldn't even boot from LiveCD.

So, maybe it's one of those weird SuSE quirks...

Have you checked kernel versions/patches? Probably not really a helpful comment, but that's where I'd look

I have a celeron nuc and i managed to get it to sleep on Linux Mint and not wake up until i hit enter on the keyboard but i forgot how I got it to do that. Then i made it into a media player using LibreElec and it did go into sleep mode. I don't use it now.

Did you check the wiki entry?