What I want to see in Linux & Results from my quest for a OS

Over the weekend i tried many OS's. I tried Fadora Core 5, SuSE 10.1, Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 Flight 7/Beta 2 and Kubuntu. I was mainly looking for hardware support (specificly for laptops (my compaq R4000) and an out-of-the-box linux. I found for the best "out-of-the-box" experiance, software wise is SuSE 10.1 and Fadora Core 5. The best "out-of-the-box" experiance, Hardware wise was Ubuntu/Kubuntu (Dapper 6.06 Flight 7).

Out of all the OS's i tried Ubuntu/Kubuntu was my favouriteUbuntu/Kubuntu still needs a little more work...I readlly liked the new network manager...it is phenomenal. I would like to see it be able to detect what type of hardware has been added to the system and then install the correct drivers by connecting to a repository) and then have a simple way to configure it. Don't get me wrong i love the command line (it is fun) but it would be nice to be able to have things working without have to compile things into my kernel. I would like to see more usability and user-friendlyness (specificly out of the box software support (ex. Media codecs installed, able to play DVD's, ect...). I would also like to see more avalablity of deb packages so any users could simply use Ubuntu/Kubuntu.

Next i tried Fadora Core 5. It was very pretty and nice to look at but i found that it was not very good on laptops. It comes with lots of software and it seemed resonably easy to install. I did not explorer this as much as i would have liked to but i wanted to explorer others.

Finally i installed SuSE 10.1. I used to use SuSE 10 all the time but got frustrated with it after time because of some bugs in YAST and minimal hardware support...at least on my laptop. (Note: Laptop support in linux NEEDS to be improved [it has been in the past year but i would like to see more]). It is one of the prettiest OS's i have ever seen. I would like to see Gnome updated to the current version and have some bugs worked out...my favourite thing about SuSE 10.1 is the out-of-the-box software support. I like how it comes with the helix engine and media codecs (if specified).

Anyway that is my take from two days of installing OS's and testing them. So as you have prabably noticed i would like to see better hardware support specificly on laptops and a more user-friendly OS. I am known to bash windows but i must say it is nice that everything "just works" . Next i will try Gentoo (v2006.0) and Solaris, so stay tuned!