The rise of distributions like Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu has led to a much greater expectation that hardware will "just work." Sadly, in the laptop world, there are still limits to this. Each laptop vendor tends to include their own special custom hardware, making it difficult to produce a general distribution. Even worse, different interpretations of standards and a tendency to implement whatever happens to be compatible with Windows may lead to such minor problems as the CPU fan not working.

This talk will discuss the issues that face laptop users, from overheating to power management to making those little accelerator keys work. On the way, it will attempt to dispel some of the myths surrounding Linux on laptops, including "It doesn't work," "Nobody cares about suspending," and "Buying an Apple laptop is a really good idea."