I have heard this many times, but not once a reasonable explanation
is it because of networking or maybe bad hardware support?
what brand is best for a Linux (Mandrake/SuSe) laptop?
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I am thinking of buying a laptop next year if I get this work
a bit early to ask, but I'm growing curious about this issue
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thnx in advance :m:

bad hardware support
Yup. The first time I tried to install linux was on a Sony Vaio laptop. I tried for 2 months, during which time is was a paperweight with varying degrees of functionality.

The automatic setup programs don't seem to work very well on laptops, so you have to do everything by hand. Great learning experience... but I didn't care to know that much.

I've had problems running Linux on my laptop. The problems I've experienced have to with ACPI. The older kernels supported APM not ACPI. Even so, I still had to recompile the kernel because my laptop is a compaq presario 721cl. These laptops have an imperfect implementation of ACPI. I finally got it going though. Never had any problems after that.

It's possible that it would be hard to get drivers for the proprietary hardware, as well.