@Toplinkar @GunnyHath I actually dislike the newer desktops, Gnome3 and Unity etc. It's gone too tablet-ized, for my liking. Still prefer Gnome2, but KDE or other lightweight window managers would work well too. Mint is pretty cool, but I haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet.
@user_pt ATI/AMD I had problems with as well, under linux. They may have improved since then, but Nvidia has always had solid drivers, and is just so much more painless. In a laptop it's trickier of course. There's a way to make it work, but quite honestly having an ATI back in the day was why it took me a lot longer to LIKE Linux, than it otherwise would have. Networking however, it's pretty rare that I see a network chipset not supported, unless it's bleeding edge new.
@canelacandy @SgTFuzzy-18 do an lspci at the terminal, and find the id of the hardware, and google it. Someone has fixed it by now, I'm sure. If not, get a $10 USB wireless card, and use that. Drivers are one of Linux's strong suits, as they write drivers for chipsets, rather than particular models, especially for network devices.
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