To setup a laptop owned by a complete PC novice any settings that may become hard to tackle remotely need to be avoided. The laptop will be administrated via SSH. One thing in my list are problems arising from improper wake-ups from suspend or hibernate as they may also affect network accessibility.

This is why I thought setting up power management to "shutdown" on closing the laptop lid could be a good idea. However I am not sure if this is a safe way to do. What problems in addition to software not closing properly (and thus not saving their data) could I be faced if I proceeded as planned?