Since rejecting Vista, I've tested several Linux flavors on my machines. Currently, I'm running Mepis 7 on an old desktop, and Mepis 6.5 on this laptop, double booting with XP. It took a fair amount of fiddling to get the onboard wireless card to work (Broadcom 43xx series, a known bear), but I never have been able to get my Wacom tablets to work properly under Mepis. I've also taken test spins with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Linux Mint. This last distribution took my breath away when my Graphire 4 came to life with all features operational on the live CD, but alas, I haven't been able to coax either wireless card to life - yet - on Linux Mint, and as it turns out, I may not have to.
PCLinuxOs is tagged as the "distribution hopper stopper." 'Couple mouthfuls there....BUT, it just brought up my wireless and tablet from the live CD. Now this is my older Graphire 2 with puck, not pressure-sensitive stylus, but it's already working better than under anything but Linux Mint, which uses the Gnome desktop btw, rather than KDE, as on Mepis and PCLinuxOS.
w o w
Wine is a Linux ap that runs some PC games flawlessly. Yeah, I like games too, but my real quest is to be able to run one or two critical mswin aps under Linux. As I understand it, this may be possible with virtualization, but if not, then I may be done with it and simply get a Mac, and triple boot OS X with XP and Linux.
Nevertheless, with a fast connection, it's easy to download the ISO image, burn a bootable CD, and take a test spin.
Recommended.
S