I currently have a Dell Latitude E6400 specs are as follows:

Processor:2.53GHz dual core
Ram: 4GB
Video: Nvidia Quadro NVS 160m
Wireless: Broadcom 4312

Right now the laptop is equipped with Windows XP Pro,and I wanted to try linux on it. Doing some research it sounds like I would be best suited with either Ubuntu or Suse Linux.

I've tried both live cd's and liked them both alot.

Basically my requirements for a distro are

Hardware support, my laptop is pretty well support by linux so this isn't really an issue. But I do have a need for a smart card reader (the laptop has a built in one and I have a usb powered one) one of the two must work.

Usage: I already use Open office, and from what I understand Microsoft office works through either wine or crossover. I do some media encoding (Ripping dvds to my hard drive then burning fair use copies)

Games: I play a fair amount of Steam platform games (Half life series, Plants vs Zombies, Audio Surf, Portal) Some console Emulators, and some iD games.

From doing my research and using the live cds of the two, Suse felt a lot more polished, maybe slightly sluggish (I suspect that was the live cd) but I have heard RPM based distros are harder to learn to use than a Deb based but this could of course be a bias bit of information.


Any real unbias input would be great but I am expecting a lot of "My distro is better than yours"

I doubt you will see my distro is better than yours. We have many threads like that. It is all linux and anyway you look at it there is a reason why Slackware is the oldest fastest most stable distribution their is.
I test bed many distro's I bought my Girl friend the same laptop and she had 5 distro's to use she played with them all and went with Slackware and puppy linux as a backup.
the only real learning curve was the bcm 4312 I cut the driver for her.
I think the debian and ubuntu distros are a little easier to set up you proprietary wifi card. just plug in the wired line and go to settings enable the hardware and let it install it.
but as far as stable and performance it is there. and if you want bleeding edge stuff slackware64-current Ubuntu daily build repo's and any of the FC stuff.
Now there are at least 50 other distro's I test but they have some sharper learning curves. Once you learn them you can stream line them to make them into high performance systems. good luck.