Intel hardware is not problem free on Windows or Mac OS X. I have a dual boot of Windows 7 on my older Lemur. The Intel driver, which last I checked, had not had an update in years for 7, still has graphic glitches in a few places. Firefox with Suspend tab extension will not render the side bar correctly (or the toolbars) on 7. Intel's drivers are just not that good.
I do not have this problem with the Mesa drivers on Linux. As far as I can tell, I do not have any problems. The Lemur is rock solid. The only reason I bought a new one was because I abuse the poor thing and System76 had a sale.
Oh, you're fortunate. I'd not seen it prior to Yosemite but the two MBP's (mid-2012 15" and early-2015 13") I have here running Yosemite and El Capitan both with external displays manage to wedge their graphics and have suspend/resume issues. The newer one in particular gets rebooted every day or it eventually wedges its display (ssh sessions continue to work, so I can sometimes recover).
This kind of issue is why I stopped bothering with linux on laptops and got a macbook.
EVERY single laptop I've used linux on (which were all researched before hand to include hardware that's not supposed to have issues with linux, and this includes a system76 lemur ultra laptop I had with ubuntu pre-installed) has had issues along these lines (e.g. random graphics driver freezes, suspend/resume issues, backlight issues, wifi issues, randomly freezing during boot etc...).
Random suspend/resume issues were by far the most common issue. With every laptop it would work like 95% of the time, but that remaining 5% of the time where it decides it doesn't want to resume is enough to make it unusable as far as I'm concerned. I've not once ever had a macbook (with OSX) refuse to suspend or resume on me.
Sometimes you could distro hop, update your kernel etc... to get past them, but there would always be some new issue along those lines that would crop up eventually. I felt like I was spending more time distro hopping, reporting bugs, trying to work around bugs etc... then I was actually doing anything productive.