I won't join in the war, but I will state that I have happily used both MDK 9.x and now SuSE 9.0 on my Compaq 2525US. MDK found most, SuSE found all of the hardware, and while I haven't used it to put the machine to sleep, it accurately reports battery status etc. Wireless, sound, etc all work splendidly, as does the CD burner.
I can second the recommendation for MDK 9.1. I have it installed on an older Dell Inspiron, and it found all of my hardware except the wireless card (which is a variation of the acx100 strain of cards -- http://acx100.sourceforge.net/ ). Boy, was that a huge pain to get working... but that's my fault for getting a chaep-o wireless card ;). Oh, I also had to to some (read: a lot) tweaks to get LIRC working with the built in IRDA port... But it was worth it, now I can change the channel on the T.V. via SSH :)
One thing to note is that the system does not always sleep when I close the lid... but my kernel uses APM (which was probably a mistake) and acx100 seems to stop the system from sleeping (or cause it to crash upon wake from sleep). I do, however, have software suspend installed (http://swsusp.sourceforge.net/) and that kicks ass! (I love swsusping and switching to Windows for a quick thing, and then booting right back to where I was in linux!) swsusp took a while to get working, but that's mostly because it required rolling my own kernel.
I'm considering upgrading to Mandrake 10.0 which I have installed on my desktop, but don't look forward to recompiling acx100_pci.
-Josh
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