So, let me tell you (this being written for my regular reader, Mum, in case you decide to upgrade from Win95...) about this Linux-on-a-laptop business. It's not as bad as TheReg might have you believe. But then, it could still be a whole lot better.
My newish Sony GR114 laptop has been really useful already - running a small network in the office, as well as being mobile. It's also a whole lot quieter than my main machine. And of course there's plenty of spare diskspace, in two partitions. For some inexplicable reason - I'd been playing with PHP and MySQL on the webserver over the last couple of weeks - it seemed a good idea to install Linux as well as Windows 2000.
Well, to cut a long story short, Debian didn't recognise the laptop's network card or the video driver. The network is fairly standard, so that was quite easy to fix, but getting the X Window system to work with the laptop's fancy graphics (ATI Radeon Mobility) was a bit trickier. Non-standard(-ish) hardware aside, I felt the Debian install just required too much prior knowledge - like, diving into cfdisk at the earliest opportunity; do you want to put /var, /usr or /upchuck on that partition? So I gave up and cut some RedHat 7.2 CDs instead. I was really surprised when these booted into a graphical installer which seemed pretty friendly. (I still had to know which parts of the filesystem to mount on which disk partitions. Why?). No surprise, though, that the X graphics wouldn't start.
But hey - RedHat got the network right first time. On my first login I could ping, ftp, wget files from the outside world. It didn't even ask me any nasty networking questions during installation. I reckon that's better than most Windows installs. So, pulling down the GATOS video drivers was quick and easy. Then, I was away: hacking XFree86 config files, getting the nasty RedHat graphics out of my lilo.conf, starting GNOME, installing Ximian...
Sure, RedHat has some weirdness (huh? what's this "/sbin/"? and where did lynx disappear to?) and Linux doesn't run Groove. I might install another distribution next week, to keep learning about the underlying OS, but I doubt it.
Best of all: the feeling that I've been missing out on a whole lot of interesting things.