I am not sure what your budget is, but I would have to agree about not buying a no-name-unless you could try one first. Not always possible unless you have a friend with one, in which case you could try the Open Suse 10.2 live dvd to give you some general ideas as to what works and what doesn't. This is not 100% as to what will NOT work though, since an install will usually make something, such as wireless, work that doesn't work from the dvd. I know this from experience as my thinkpad T60 works perfectly with SLED-wireless, compiz,etc.-yet when I try the OpenSuse 10.2 live dvd my Intel 3945 wireless card will not work. However, the live dvd is still a good thing to try-assuming you want to use OpenSuse. I have installed various Suse releases on several older laptops, and I was able to make everything work with a little research. Generally speaking however, getting wireless to work required the greatest amount of effort, but the laptops I worked with did not have built in wireless and I was dealing with add-in cards. I assume that any new one you buy will have built in wireless of course, so you may or may not encounter problems. If you know before you buy it will be easy to see if you have a supported card. The same thing could also be said of getting desktop effects to work. Another option that you might look into would be to buy a good used or re-furbed laptop. You could always do a quick search on one and see if it has a record of linux support. You can find someone who is either running linux, or has tried to run linux on almost any laptop available. I was in your predicament last year. I had an old HP N3210 that I was running Suse 9.2(I think) on. It worked but when I went back to college I needed something with more speed and memory. I almost bought a business model HP because most HP notebooks work well with linux, however I ended up with a basic thinkpad T60-probably the least expensive T60 one could buy- which was still almost twice the price of the HP. I do not regret my choice, but if I had been on a strict budget I would have bought the HP or something comparable. Really though, if you do a little research beforehand you should be able to buy a laptop and be pretty sure that it will run your preferred distro.