Just read Nicolas his post and immediately tried it, and worked for me 2. Ubuntu and Debian came out, exactly my 2 prefered distro’s (and what I’m running on most of my computers). So check it out and try the distro they tell you, you might be surprissed at how far we’ve already come.
imho for regular destkop users, linux is almost if not further than windows. By this I mean an out of the box installation. Heck we support more drivers out of the box than windows, and I do speak out of experience here, I installed a windows on a ibm work laptop and had to fetch the network drivers from the internet, before I was able to get internet to download the rest of my drivers (videocard,soundcard,…) when I popped in my ubuntu disc, everything was up and running, even glxgears ran smoothly!!
Comparing prepared versions doesn’t count if you ask me, because those are custom made and everybody can do that 2 with a linux to fit some specific needs, to bad nobody does it for linux, who knows what’ll happen when windows come with their vista. I hope to see more ubuntu laptops pop up.