Comment by mquander

For what it's worth, seven or eight years ago, it was a huge exercise in wizardry for me to get every piece of hardware working on my laptops under Slackware or Gentoo or Debian. If it wasn't the wireless, it was the sound, the graphics card, or the ACPI. Then I enjoyed the careful prospect of fiddling with X and window manager configuration files endlessly if I wanted any kind of pleasant GUI.

I just installed Ubuntu on my new Dell laptop the other week, for the sake of running a particular thing that isn't available on Windows, and the difference is eye-popping. Zero configuration for any hardware. (For some reason, it didn't load the ATI drivers by default, having them in a "restricted" category, but it was easy to add them.) Wireless worked out of the box. No package management problems. Totally capable GUI configuration. 90% as usable as Windows 7.

Additionally, I didn't even have to repartition my drive to install it, which blew my mind. It installed into a disk image with a Windows installer, and modified the Windows bootloader to boot from the image. That's sure a big improvement from (to a newbie, extremely scary) disk partitioning and LILO/GRUB adventures.