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> You can't expect to slap a random distro on a random computer and expect 100% of everything to work without some tweaking.

Right, and I think most people agree with this. But we can't assent to that and then turn around and claim "Linux is just as user-friendly as Windows/OS X" or "Anybody can use Linux; it just works." It does nobody any good to pretend that Mint (or Ubuntu, or whatever) is yet at the level of Win 7 or OS X in terms of out-of-the-box usability. People who are unequivocally recommending Linux to the average layperson are doing everybody a disservice.

>buy from a manufacturer that does for Linux what a HP would do for Windows

I should hope not - I have still had issues with broken drivers on HP hardware with the included Windows operating system. In fact, Linux seems to have better drivers in this case.

System 76 is great, but too expensive to be a good recommendation for most friends and family. As far as hardware support: I'm not so troubled when some exotic device doesn't work, but I'm talking about HDMI here, it is THE standard media connector, and the video card does work apart from HDMI.

I haven't tried Dell's ubuntu laptops, are they compatible?

Do these things work "out-of-the-box"?