[wplug] laptop distro suggestions

[Aroon Pahwa]

Hey everyone,  I got an IBM X40 a couple months ago and I've decided I
cant live with windows.

I'm really really new to the whole linux community and especially all
the various distros so anytime i go hunting i feel kind of
overwhelmed.  it sounds like you can take almost any distro and mold
it to what you need, however, im looking for something that doesn't
take too much customization as i don't have much time or know how.

the most important things to me are that the gui is very user friendly
and looks damn good (gotta show off to friends right?), that i get a
lot of power management options (ive heard past kernels had no cpu
throttling options, etc so you got terrible battery life compared to
running windows), and that (of course) it supports all my hardware.

so far ive been looking at ubuntu and ive heard a lot of people say
its perfect for a laptop and that most hardware just works right off
the bat (yay).  ive also been looking at gentoo since ive been happy
with my past experience with gentoo and i have a friend who has set up
a laptop successfully with gentoo and get comparable battery life to
his windows install.  ive also heard slackware is a good choice.'

i'm pretty sure i know i want to run the 2.7.8 kernel as ive heard it
solves a lot of graphical and HID issues with IBM laptops.  im also
really attracted gentoo's portage because it makes package management
so darn easy, but i don't even know how well other distro's handle
packages or how well other package managers like apt-something work. 
all i know is rpm hell is a pain and im pretty sure i dont want to run
fedora core 2 (i use it at work on a laptop and im not a big fan).

all suggestions and info are much appreciated!  thanks =]

aroon pahwa
vipersyx at gmail.com