Well, I've been trying to decide on a Distro for my Desktop, so I downloaded all 8 iso's of Debian.... And I've yet to burn them all, but I was wondering... how does debian run on laptops? I've got Mandrake 9.1, although I've been having some annoyances that are particular to mandrake... And I wanted to try something else. I have koppix, but that works much better as a boot disk, than as an actual Distro. It did impress me, and I wanted to try debian, which it was based on. Any one have a feeling for how debian works on laptops? Specifically HP Laptops? (How about the ze5385us?)

I don't know about your particular laptop, but Debian can be a chore to get working with recent laptops, especially if you use the stable release (woody, 3.0r1). I don't have power management working (ACPI); sound doesn't work; video is only supported in XFree86 through the VESA driver; I had to download a driver for my network adapter (quite a problem before you have Internet access under Linux); etc. My current configuration is enough for quotidien (borrowing from French here) purposes, but I must reboot into Windows XP if I want to use multimedia applications or play computer games.

Well, I tried installign it on my desktop, and I was pretty disapointed with it. I decided I'll keep my nice Mandrake 9.1 install.. where everything works.... I just was wondering for a freind's laptop.. and I think form what I saw, debian needs to do alot of leg work to make it's installs user friendly.....

I just installed Debian Sid on an IBM Thinkpad 380XD and it is running pretty good. It picked up my 3com nic and I was able to install a Woody base and then upgrade it to Sid.

I haven't gotten sound to work but I see there is alsa drivers for the CS4236 sound card.

Other then that, up to this point, everything seems to be fine.