Quote Originally Posted by keepoffgrass View Post
I just started running Ubuntu on my laptop a couple weeks ago. I prefer it to XP which was on the laptop to start with. I was going to run both xp and ubuntu, but my windows partition crashed and disappeared right after I set it up, so I just reformatted the darn thing and went with just Ubuntu. Im still getting used to some of the things, the the terminal and stuff, but Im getting the hang of it. Amazingly. I had almost no driver issues, everything ran totally smooth after the install, its way better for networking. The only problem I had was getting the right video drivers to play dvds and a bit of an issue with getting the streaming media plug-ins in firefox to work. I got that to work after an hour or so though. the only real problem I still have is that when my system goes idle for if disconnects the wireless network and I cant get it to long back on without rebooting. All in all, its way less hassle than it was when I reinstalled windows the first few million times due to complete system failures and the blue screens of death.Forget windows.
Not sure if you're aware of this or not, but Dell is selling desktops and laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. HP and a growing number of computer manufacturers are following too.

I've never used a laptop but I do know that you can log onto the freenode irc network, join the #ubuntu channel and get lots of help there. Last I looked there were over 1,000 people in that channel all the time. XChat is a good irc client, and you can install it with

Code:
sudo apt-get install xchat
I used Ubuntu since Warty was released and recently switched to Kubuntu because I like the KDE desktop.