A recent CentOS kernel upgrade on my work laptop (Dell Inspiron M5010) caused my WiFi driver (which was flakey to begin with - and that was using the manufacturer supplied linux driver) to stop working entirely. Got fed up with problems including suspend being one way (you could suspend, but not un-suspend), and finally committed to reloading the operating system. Just for curiosity I tried a hackintosh distro, but that didn't even load.
Decided to go with the most progressive distro that was the most compatible with the environment (RHEL) that I was used to, and chose Fedora. Installed Fedora 17 and was pleasantly surprised that everything worked - well, almost everything. After the initial DVD install, it locked up before the graphical login prompt, so I had to CTRL-ALT-Fx over to a text window, log in, and yum update it. But after that, everything was super. WiFi worked, no patches, no loading kmod-compat-wireless, or firmware files, no checking messages for failure messages, suspend works in both directions. Actually is a functional platform.
I'm a bit thrown by the differences in the latest Gnome - using mouse position instead of a clickable area to bring down the menu, and then the tablet-like and ios-like interfaces. I'm still getting used to that, but I think I like it. The biggest problem is that ALT-TAB switches between applications, but not subwindows without further arrow key manipulation. I'm so used to a quick ALT-TAB to flip back and forth between two windows, without regard to them being the same type (xterm vs chrome for example) that this is going to be a difficult adjustment. Worst is that I see no control panel UI option for reverting to previous behavior, which I would definitely choose to do if I could find it.
TL;DR For linux laptop, use Fedora not CentOS.
