So I was given an older Toshiba Satellite Pro notebook. 40 gig hard drive, single core processor....not impressive but definitely usable. I figured I'd install ubuntu or some other linux distro on it and use it for web development or something with Ruby on Rails/MySQL etc. As I was installing the OS, I'm also looking up drivers, in particular a wireless driver b/c I have never installed any OS onto a machine without having to install several drivers, especially the wireless card. Ubuntu finished its install and I was armed with a jump drive carrying a windows version of the WLAN driver (which I intended to install using ndiswrapper) but the machine was already detecting my network! I about shat myself, then decided to rave about it on the forums. So there you have it, my testimonial about Ubuntu's powerful hardware recognition.