I have acer aspire 3680 laptop (Old model), with 1.5G RAM and 1.7Mhz Processor, 60Gig HDD. This is my personal laptop.
I love Linux from the day, i involved into it. My laptop Wireless card is not working, so i am using external card for internet.
I installed 10.3,11.0. But all these versions does not love my card and always had problems while connecting and browsing internet. So i had no choice except to use M$ for time being. I used other Linux distros, the result were the same.
2 weeks ago i installed opensuse 11.1 Gnome on this laptop and everything works like a charm. But to tell you: I always have very bad experience with Gnome desktop, i love it. But it was never stable for me. I tried to use in my office PC too, always got into troubles, So i am using 11.0 with KDE 4.2.2 in my office PC.
After one week of this installation, system started some nice behaviour, which i mentioned above, that i had bad experience with Gnome. After trying and trying, every thing brooked and i had to use M$ again, it was dual boot, so i had not to install M$ again.
4 days ago i download Mandriva 2009.1 with KDE, and installed it with M$ with dual boot removing 11.1 Gnome. Till now i’m using it, trying to break the things, i have to say. That it works very well than others.
Here M$ stands M$ XP SP3.
So the conclusion is, that different distros works well with different types of PCs and laptops. Not necessary, that every distro pick up all your hardwares.
I had always problem with my wireless card, but from kernel 2.6.27 and onwards, its works fine.
Mandriva came with 2.6.29 and KDE 4.2.2.
Another thing, while using all KDE versions, except series 3.5, KDE 4.2.2 is stable version so far (Just for me, may be for others too).
So i am using openSUSE 11.0 KDE 4.2.2 and Mandriva 2009.1 KDE 4.2.2.