I have heard people say that they had trouble using Linux on a Toshiba laptop. Also, what would be a good distribution to use for a little programming and web browsing?

To be honest, from the way you word your question I'm guessing the main thing you are going to be concerned with is KDE vs Gnome. These are the two window managers that most of the major distributions use (OpenSUSE uses KDE and Ubuntu uses Gnome, for instance). This choice is mostly based on their look and feel, but some apps are specifically written for KDE or Gnome, so you'd just have to check that you're not going to develop a sudden need for Gedit... Other than that, you might want to look at how easy it is to install new programmes (Ubuntu and Kubuntu both have nice programmes to do it automagically for you, others use "yum" - I'm not an amazing fan of yum though).

With regards to laptops, I haven't had a problem installing on any toshiba laptop (except for one, but that was decrepit and had a really really really old BIOS and no working CD drive...)

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Well I've installed on my Toshiba 30+ different distros and they all worked well.

Programming and browsing you say, well since you're a noob, I recommend Linux Mint 9 with GNOME. Burn the image, install the distro and then via Synaptic install all that you want related to programming, because browsing is covered by default.

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Ubuntu, Mint, and PCLinuxOS are regarded as the most "beginner friendly" of the major distros, according to this informative article: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

You can save yourself a lot of time and effort by thoroughly testing a distro as a "Live CD" prior to installing. If there are any incompatibilities with your hardware, you can identify them in Live CD mode and save yourself the wasted time of a failed install. Keep trying Live CDs until you find a distro that you like and that runs well on your hardware.

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Hello N3rdBird and welcome to LQ,most problems are with wireless cards, you may check the output of lspci with a live-CD and compare with the Linux HCL http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php/cat/10Slackware. If you want to learn a bit about Linux and don't avoid a learning curve, I'd recommend to go for Slackware http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/

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