Amen. I've had good success with Ubuntu, but have run into a couple of machines on which it has repeatedly failed to install, and a Dell Latitude laptop that won't work with it's built-in wireless adapter. It does, however, work just fine with a USB wireless device.
Herein lies the advantage of running from a live CD/DVD and testing everything before committing to dual-booting or replacing your OS outright.
Agreed. I tend to perform a lot of research before my computer purchases, though. A major part of my research involves chipsets, and compliance with standards.
Using those standards, I tend to buy more from generic suppliers and white box builders than I do major brands, with a few exceptions.
My current laptop is an MSI GT680R. I purchased it (in 2010) with 8GB of RAM but have upgraded it to 16GB. It's got hardware RAIDed dual HDDs and a quad-core i7. The HDMI, wireless, DVD, dual-monitors, all networking, NVidia graphics, sound--everything on it--just works.
I've run in to this too but in some cases it's the hardware limitations of the machine is the reason they won't install. I then usually try lighter versions of Linux, like Zorin Lite OS, Lubuntu, or Peppermint and they usually install with little or no problems.
CGato