I have a one year old Dell Inspiron 1525 with Ubuntu.
Not the best laptop ever but at least since Ubuntu 9.10 ... 3D graphics worked out of the box (open-source, Intel), Wifi worked out of the box (not so on OpenSuse or Debian), the built-in webcam worked out of the box, practically everything is up and running as soon as you install Ubuntu, no extra configuration required.
Not only that, but I also got an external 3G modem from Vodafone, that also worked out of the box.
As I've said before ... there are plenty of configurations that are running just fine with Ubuntu, but if you're going to shop at random of course you're going to have problems. Heck ... my external 3G modem wasn't compatible with Vista out of the box, you had to search for an updated driver on the Internet.
Apparently some people have laptops that worked great with earlier Ubuntu releases but don't work after an upgrade. That's scary to me -- I could do careful research and buy a laptop now, only to have an upgrade make my laptop unusable. Then at the very best I'd have to downgrade and be stuck on an earlier version of Ubuntu while they classify it as a medium-priority bug and leave it broken in subsequent releases.
P.S. To make this more specific, I've been thinking about buying a refurbished Thinkpad, and one of the commenters on the bug says suspend/resume stopped working on his T61p in Lucid and remains broken in Maverick.
I've had similar issues with Ubuntu upgrades in the past. I went to Debian (stable) instead, figuring the longer upgrade cycles would mean fewer problems. That was all well and good until I needed to enable backports to upgrade Firefox to >=3.5 for work. Now the package manager's broken due to some weird dependency issues.
I don't understand why there is no free software equivalent of Apple, selling (laptop) hardware and maintaining a GNU/Linux distro that's guaranteed to work on it. Surely there's a buck or two to made?
There are a couple such companies, I think. One is called Emperor Linux (if it's still in business) and offered reasonably late-model Vaio laptops among others.
And to my knowledge none of them do direct distro maintenance to keep the laptops they've sold supported -- they just resell OEM (Sager-style) laptops that they spec conservatively so that all the hardware is supported when sold.
I think an LTS version of Ubuntu would be better than Debian, if you want longer upgrade cycles.
ZaReason and System76 are two vendors that sell laptops with Ubuntu. I don't know if they actively support Ubuntu upgrades for their hardware (in the sense of testing/fixing bugs).
For what it's worth, I've had numerous Thinkpads (T23, T42, currently typing this on a T61) and suspend/resume always worked for me.
Not always right out of the box -- I had to research workarounds for video-related problems a few years ago.
Not always without problems -- on two occasions a wifi driver bug prevented the suspend from going through and my laptop spent a few hot hours in the backpack. (The Thinkpad survived that splendidly with no problems.)
Things are getting better all the time. Not monotonically -- there are regressions every now and then -- but in general more and more things work for more and more people.
I have a several-year-old Dell Vostro 1400, completely stock, and as I mentioned in a different comment, every distro update since Hardy has broken something that used to work. Intrepid broke wireless--I had to swap out my Broadcom wifi card for an Intel one. Jaunty broke graphics--I couldn't use Compiz without doing some insanely obscure rollback patch to a different version of X or something like that (can't recall now as this was some time ago... Google "intel gm965" hardy). Karmic broke sound--every few minutes my music would permanently transform into loud static. Solution: hotkey `killall pulseaudio` to F12. Lucid seems fairly stable so far. I'm crossing my fingers for Maverick. But all of these problems are on the same laptop with the same hardware! (Except for the wifi card).
I have a one year old Dell Inspiron 1525 with Ubuntu.
Not the best laptop ever but at least since Ubuntu 9.10 ... 3D graphics worked out of the box (open-source, Intel), Wifi worked out of the box (not so on OpenSuse or Debian), the built-in webcam worked out of the box, practically everything is up and running as soon as you install Ubuntu, no extra configuration required.
Not only that, but I also got an external 3G modem from Vodafone, that also worked out of the box.
As I've said before ... there are plenty of configurations that are running just fine with Ubuntu, but if you're going to shop at random of course you're going to have problems. Heck ... my external 3G modem wasn't compatible with Vista out of the box, you had to search for an updated driver on the Internet.