So I got a new laptop when I changed jobs. It's a Dell Vostro, forget the exact model number, but it's a pretty nice system except for the lousy screen resolution (that's a different rant). At my new company, we have no IT department. We are a bunch of engineers and techies and pretty much are expected to maintain our own systems as we see fit.
The system came with Windows 7 on it which, other than having to relearn where all the useful things are, has been fine. However I support custom Linux systems and run Linux as my desktop at home for a number or reasons. So, I decided to try an put Linux on my laptop and see how far I got.
It.... just worked. I was actually quite impressed. I put Kubuntu 12..04 on it, and out of the box, everything worked. Wireless, sound, sleep. I had to add APM stuff to get better fan control and power utilization. I installed wicd instead of the default KDE network manage, not because the former didn't work, but because the latter automatically shuts down the wireless connection when I plug in the wired. KDE even detects when I plug in a second monitor and does the right thing. The first time it asks what I want to do with it, then it just does it. So far I have had to fire up a shell and editor for one thing: to enable hibernate. There is a long discussion thread about it being disabled by default and why and whether it should be, but I re-enabled it, and it works great too.
I'm still working through how I want to set up my interaction with the network at the office and at home. I'm used to running with NFS home directories, NIS, etc. This doesn't get along well with a mobile system switching back and forth from wired and wireless, going to sleep, etc, but this isn't a Linux issue per-se. Not sure what I'm going to settle one.
All in all, this has been a much easier experience than expected.
--SS