No matter what distro you go with, theres always the possibility you may have a piece of hardware that isn't properly supported out of the box. Mandrake 8, I had to build my own kernel module for my video card in order to use X because none of the provided modules worked right..........I hadn't the slightest f'ing clue how to do that, but after a couple days (Yeah I know days sounds disturbing) I managed to build my module properly from driver source. Don't ever get frustrated and give up, it's a learning experience that you'll be proud of when you do get it. I know I was jumping up and down when I finally got KDE fired up and installed Quake 3 and it all went off without a hitch. Dual booting Windows REALLY comes in handy here for 2 reasons. #1 You can hop online and find the info you need to learn #2 You can hop on Windows and say "F*** it!" for a little while and then go back to it later.