I'm not a beginner. For want of a better category to post in I posted in newbies.

Oops!

If you are comfortable with Arch and its installation, I would go with it. You can customize your experience 100% with OpenBox, Tint2, Conky and the rest. It's rare to find a case where Arch doesn't have a driver for something.

But for ease and quickness of installation,. you could go with Ubuntu or Debian. You really need to just try them!

Good luck friend

I'm trying to avoid arch for this system because in my experience arch requires high mantainence and is not good for systems that require large amount of stability. This computer is going to be my daily driver. I'm considering debian but debian stable has quite old packages.... If there were something like arch which wasn't rolling release that would be great!

The latest ubuntu looks tempting. Unity has become really really good as compared to 11.04. Plus my laptop will mostly have a touchscreen so unity is tempting.

How would you guys recommend sabayon to be with respect to hardware compatibility? In addition is the software selection good too? Will I have to compile some packages from source? I am hard-pressed for time so I may not be able to do that. Please assist.

A reviewer once said that the Sabayon developers are better at adding things than making sure that they work, and my experience tends to support that.

If you are buying a very recent model, then you need a recently released distro to get the components supported straight off, but whether you want a rolling release depend on how patient you are when updates break things! PCLinuxOS is relatively safe rolling-release, and Mint keeps pretty up-to-date. But as some-one said, the best thing is to make a shortlist of preferred computers and then search to see if their video or wifi give problems with Linux. I'd avoid Optimus graphics, to save messing about manually switching chips with Bumblebee.

After a lot of deliberation I decided to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad x240. It suited my purpose best. I decided to avoid touchscreen finally. I'm thinking of a good ode distro but I am confused about what to choose.... I'm looking at Netrunner but I'm not sure of whether to use thee rolling release version or the standard one. So thats where it stands for now.

Somebody recently recommended Netrunner in an online chat I was in. I loaded it up in VirtualBox and it seemed a little clunky (I couldn't work out how to update all the software). However, I don't know what kind of hardware support it has and I did fail to read the documentation. The install looked sensible and I'll play with it more as I'm sure I'm missing some features by being lazy.

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If you're familiar with Linux and are looking for rock-solid stability, flexibility and usability, I highly recommend Slackware. Slackware does not "release early and release often," rather it aims for un-fooled-around-with software that, as much as possible, is what upstream developers intended; e.g., Firefox is not branded -- you get what Mozilla intended (as with Thunderbird and SeaMonkey). Slackware comes with a wide choice of window managers (KDE, Xfce, etc.). A full installation includes all the development tools, compilers, etc., etc. that you'll probably ever need. With SlackBuilds.org (http://slackbuilds.org/) providing hundreds of add-on installable packages, if there's something you need, you'll most likely find it there.

Hope this helps some.

If you need an enterprise linux with support though, you will be hard pressed to find something better than Red Hat Enterprise.

Slackware is nice if you expect to have in-house support, specializing in slackware. If not, you will be relying on forums and IRC to get support.