I don't have any experience with multitouch touchpads, but everything works out of the box on my Latitutde E6500 as well as on my coworker's various other Dell

I don't have any experience with multitouch touchpads, but everything works out of the box on my Latitutde E6500 as well as on my coworker's various other Dell laptops. This laptop has the nVidia display (I historically have avoid nVidia, but the company is opening up and the non-proprietary drivers are getting better), bluetooth, WiFi, SD card, etc. all Just Working. I am running 12.04.2 with the 3.5.0-26-generic kernel - I installed the linux-lts-quantal package to pick up the updated kernel and xorg drivers (better nVidia support). Thinkpads historically have been very compatible with linux (our family machine is a T61 I bought off of eBay very reasonably). Also nVidia display (very nice resolution LCD). I also have a [edit] XPS M1210 vintage 2006 that also works very well, has since I bought it. I initially dual-booted, but then never used the WinXP boot and ultimately booted it off the island. The only niggling problem I am having at this point is getting the bluetooth mouse running after a suspend/resume. Something is not coordinating in xorg - the work-around is to flip to a different virtual console and then back to the primary X11 console (<CTL><ALT><F1> <CTL><ALT><F7>). There is also something wrong with the bluetooth mouse battery display in the applet which can crash the machine(!) on resume on my XPS13. I'm not seeing that on my other laptops. The work-around is to not turn on the mouse until the machine has fully resumed. This problem came in with the linux-lts-quantal software upgrade and I expect it to be fixed Real Soon Now. The key is to get a fairly generic laptop. I don't buy Sonys, for instance, because they have a long history of using oddball proprietary peripheral chips/configurations that don't work well with linux.