My son has just put Ubuntu on his Sony laptop.
Quite nice (if you like that sort of thing) but we got stuck installing Samba (necessary to view his windoze partition data).
And, along with apparently half the internet, we found that it doesn't support WPA/PSK so all our wifi access points, home and work, would have to be reconfigured (with plain old 64-bit WEP) specially for it
In this fairly basic respect it is about 3 years behind windoze.