I've been using two Dell laptops over the past 5 or so years with Ubuntu. Usually they work fine, but every release breaks some little thing that used to work

I've been using two Dell laptops over the past 5 or so years with Ubuntu. Usually they work fine, but every release breaks some little thing that used to work before. Sometimes it gets fixed with an update, but more often than not you're stuck with an annoyance for the next 6 months, until it gets fixed and a new annoyance pops in. For example, in upgrading Karmic my previously-working Intel graphics card was blacklisted for some reason; in the Pulseaudio release (Jaunty? Lucid?) I had to have "killall pulseaudio" bound to a hotkey because it shat itself so often; in Oneiric my previously-working AMD graphics card failed to update window titles, making the system unusuable; in Precise Compiz crashes every few hours and window previews don't work any more. Basically, if you can configure your laptop to use as much Intel hardware as possible, you should be OK. Whatever you do don't get AMD graphics (I've been dealing with it for two years now and it's my biggest regret in my laptop) and make sure to get Intel wifi. Do a quick Google search for every piece of hardware just to double check, and you'll be OK.