Interesting - I think your prejudices are out of date. Ubuntu has been an out-of-the-box thing for me for the last two or three years, on old and new hardware,

Interesting - I think your prejudices are out of date. Ubuntu has been an out-of-the-box thing for me for the last two or three years, on old and new hardware, laptop and desktop. Of course I avoid Acer on principle, preferring to stick with Toshiba wherever possible, and I admit I'm not thrilled with its battery sensor support, but the old problems with dual monitors, suspend/resume, sound cards, video cards etc are a shadow of what they used to be. Meanwhile, my own experience with the Red Hat family is with CentOS, which is either kept artificially out of date for security reasons ("bleeding edge" is well-named, generally) or else I only ever saw poorly-configured old versions. So I don't know enough to compare it, but I'm comfortable with the Debian family so I'm sticking with Ubuntu.