The Grumpy Editor's Guide to distributions for laptops

Ditto to the puzzlement of several posters over your choices, including the absence of
Mandriva. I tried Debian Etch first on my T22 Thinkpad, and even though the installation was
generally okay and everything seemed to work, had so much trouble with setting up wireless I
switched to Mandriva 2008.0. It has been relatively trouble-free, and in particular no
fiddling around with iwconfig, etc. Everything else also works well, and I have found the
Mandriva people good about listening to their users and fixing problems with updates.