Erik Christiansen <dvalin@internode.on.net> wrote:
Yes, there's much to be said for choosing a laptop known to be linux-friendly. For my first attempt at a laptop installation recently, I blew away everything on a new Thinkpad Edge E520, and installed Debian & LXDE. It just worked. No effort required.
I had a similar experience with my current laptop. It doesn't have an optical drive, so I set up PXE (with a friend's advice). It was then a straightforward matter of bringing the laptop home, connecting the Ethernet cable, and booting into a Debian installer. All partitions on the drive were deleted during the installation process, as was my intention. I had alread made sure that the BIOS was configured with PXE enabled. Obviously, one could do the same with a USB memory stick.