LinuxQuestions.org - Is linux a good choice for a notebook?

Excuse me for posting similar messages but this really seems to be a problem to me. I have a Toshiba Satellite L10-202 which comes with Windows XP HE. First of all Windows runs great, power management works fine, all this because of the Toshiba's utilities. I also have a PC (ADM Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 7000, ...) on which I run Slackware since September 2003. I think that my first contact with linux was in February 2003 when I installed RedHat 8. I am now surrounded by CDs with linux distribution like Slackware from 91. to 10.2, RedHat, Fedora SUSE, Gentoo, Mandrake... and two versions of FreeBSD... to many CDs but I don't know what to install on my notebook... for a PC it would be easy... Slackware but let's talk about a laptop:
I need the hardware to work 100%. at this part I am afraid I wont be able to use ACPI without any problems. (I have a poor dial-up internet connection so I am looking for distros that run great on laptop without downloading additional software). I installed SuSE 10 yesterday... it works fine although all the stuff with "config in one click" seems so alien to me because I am used to configure things just by modifying some text files. The fan starts from time to time so I guess acpi works.. but it doesn't works great because the power management in KDE tells me the acpi is partially working. I checked in /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/ (I think this is the path) that the CPU(Celeron M 1.6 GHz) temperature is 51-57 degrees Celsius. Is that OK for a Celeron or it is too hot? So if I install Slackware and recompile the kernel 2.6.13 (or 2.6.14) the acpi would run OK, or I would have problems with acpi or with some drivers and I have to spend hour in front of it to make it work and to transform my laptop in some sort of test ground? I don't like this. I like to edit text files, see how the system really works, tracking processes(I am not a great Slackware user, I know little about servers and networks because of my poor connection to Internet but I am used to use Slackware as a desktop, modifying it to look and work OK - but that's on PC). I like to know the kernel fully supports my hardware.
Using Windows isn't such a nightmare to me. I need an operating system that enables me to edit documents, see movies, listen music, program in C or JAVA... and linux distributions mentioned above have all the necessary software.
Thanks!