No problem.
I think you might have misunderstood me, what I meant was that for some
reason, my laptop appears to only accept the Debian based distros. In your
case, every Debian based seems to give you trouble. So, maybe you should go
to another "family", maybe Fedora-family,since it works well for you.
However, I agree that from what one reads online, Fedora versions are "hit or
miss". Some of them are very crashy.
Since you are on the look for a NEW laptop, I would suggest actually trying
one that supports Debian family. You have two FSF endorsed distros (if that
is important for you) Triquel and GNewSense, you have Debian itself which is
also free software only, you also get other kind of distros like Tails (since
you like Tor, you probably have heard of Tails by now) and Puppy (for some
specific ocasions it can be good).
As for the hardware... one thing you must realise is that no manufacturer out
there thinks "I will build a laptop with free software friendly hardware
only". Yes, ThinkPenguim and Glug actually make some changes on laptops that
are themselves very friendly, but you don't need to buy there if it is a
problem to you (because of the reasons you mentioned below). You can just
look at the specs and look for one that uses the same hardware brands and
such.
There are some good rules of thumb: no CPU with vPro or Txt, no ATI graphics
card (you won't have ANY luck playing games with that, trust me), etc.
Basically by taking a Trisquel live cd you can be assured that at least
Trisquel will run on it, that is already good. If eventually you want to
change, the Debian family has a lot of distros that will also run great with
free software only, since you already do so with trisquel. If you want a free
bios, look for one that is supported by Coreboot, and decide if you want to
make the work yourself (or if you prefer contacting glug and have them doing
that for you on your laptop, maybe they can provide that service too).
Well, sorry for the long reply, but I hope it was any help for you. Let us
know how it turns out ;)
