The point about it running well on old hardware is well taken. Installing a new OS onto an old box very often results in an apparent speed-up. I was amazed at how fast my old pc was when I upgraded to a new pc, and re-installed XP from scratch on the old one. It was amazing. Unfortunately we then started loading software on it, doing all the normal day-to-day stuff on it, and it's since slowed down again.
Unfortunatly installing Ubuntu on _new_ hardware is a different thing altogether. There you're far more likely to encounter problems as you have newer hardware (espaecially graphics hardware). We got two new "desktop" machines a year ago to use as file servers. Nice Intel motherboards, integrated high-end graphics and so on. A week of trying though (and we tried hard) and we simply could not make the graphics work right. And don't get me started on the RAID support. In the end we started again with Fedora and were up and running in a day. Fedora was more conservative with window transitions and so on, but I could get it to run for more than an hour, and VNC worked.
We use Linux a lot for servers, but I'm in no rush to roll it out for workstations. We'll keep trying every couple years, but it seems like 2 steps forward, one step back sometimes.
> Unfortunatly installing Ubuntu on _new_ hardware is a different thing altogether.
This. I made the unfortunate mistake of trying to install Ubuntu on one of the new Toshiba Porteges. I was not expecting such terrible device support (built-in Intel graphics would freeze or kernel panic in full-screen; insert/remove to the HDMI port would cause X to run up to 100% of CPU and be unresponsive to input; screen dimmer would seemingly randomly dim and light while I was working; etc.).
Unfortunately laptop support somewhat lags behind in Linux, mostly due to bizarre hardware idiosyncrasies. Toshiba, Sony are particularly despised for their botched BIOS and ACPI, strange hardware management, and complete lack of alternate OSes support.
Most of the time Asus, Dell and Lenovo laptops work, though.
However it's unfortunately a good advice to always check with a live CD that your distro actually supports decently the laptop you're about to buy.
Unfortunatly installing Ubuntu on _new_ hardware is a different thing altogether. There you're far more likely to encounter problems as you have newer hardware (espaecially graphics hardware). We got two new "desktop" machines a year ago to use as file servers. Nice Intel motherboards, integrated high-end graphics and so on. A week of trying though (and we tried hard) and we simply could not make the graphics work right. And don't get me started on the RAID support. In the end we started again with Fedora and were up and running in a day. Fedora was more conservative with window transitions and so on, but I could get it to run for more than an hour, and VNC worked.
We use Linux a lot for servers, but I'm in no rush to roll it out for workstations. We'll keep trying every couple years, but it seems like 2 steps forward, one step back sometimes.