Easily installable Linux on a laptop?

I have been recently thinking that a Dell 8600 Inspiron laptop and run Red Hat Linux 9.0 and BSD UNix but I hav read some reviews saying it is horrible. I am really left questioning if a laptop exists that person could easily install Linux or Unix on. So far all I have found are people saying it is possible to succesfully use everyhting on a laptop, but it is incredibly hard to do it and their is the risk of it only partially owrking or not working at all. So, the question is, is their a recently released (1 to 1 and a half years since its initial release) laptop that could easily run Linux?

I have a Presario 2500 Laptop, and installed Suse 9.0 and RH 9.0 and both worked great.

The only thing I had trouble gettig to work was the Wireless card.

I'm not an expert at linux, and to me it was a pretty easy install, and pretty easy to get everything to work.