FWIW, I've been a problem free laptop user of Ubuntu for two years running now. I have an older Dell laptop with the Intel Centrino chipset, Intel wifi, Intel

FWIW, I've been a problem free laptop user of Ubuntu for two years running now. I have an older Dell laptop with the Intel Centrino chipset, Intel wifi, Intel graphics, etc, and everything on it has just worked out of the box since 8.04. It's also the only Linux machine in my house that uses KMS [1], so I get a nice, fast, high resolution display/splash/vte from the moment grub initializes the kernel. All of my desktops have Nvidia cards which also work out of the box with KMS, but enabling the official binary drivers for 3D performance breaks KMS. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/KernelModeSetting https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/KernelModeSetting