My first laptop __ever__(Dell Inspiron 6400), bought out my hard earned money. The Dell package is little heavy. I lug the package home at around 8.30PM. Unpacked the laptop, booted into Vista(preinstalled crap..), installed ubuntu in 15 to 20 minutes. It was love at first sight. I wanted to readjust my disk partitions and so reinstalled it couple of times until it was satisfactory. Logged into gnome.. and guess what, it listed all the wireless networks in my area.. I was just taken aback.. This just exceeded my expectations.. And then speakers.. they worked too.. And then package installation .. got around package distribution commands after a few tries(now have to write a package of mine so I understand things better- Ofcourse Debian style).
So what makes it better
1. Good collection of packages
2. Packages working out of the box(So damn neat)
4 months still with Ubuntu and going strong
Installations: Laptop, Office Desktop(Much to the irritation of my manager ;))