So, at work, I asked them to give me a laptop to install a portable
development environment at.

Installing NetBSD went approximately like:

  Hm, seems to wedge halfway through loading the boot image off the
  CD.  Toast two floppies.  Cool, it works.  Install, install.  5
  minutes later it's booting off the hard disk, with PCMCIA and USB
  working just fine, etc.  Install GENERIC_LAPTOP to get CardBus
  (dumb, but still necessary).  Cool, everything works except the
  audio (CS4610 + ISA codec, which will probably work `okay' with the
  wss driver when I get around to testing it).  The suspend buttons
  work, too -- even suspend-to-disk (except the BIOS seems to beep in
  annoyance and refuse to suspend when the CardBus slots are powered
  up; not sure what's up with that).

Installing Another Open Source Operating System went approximately
like this:

  Hm, CD boot program denies that the CD-ROM exists.  Toast two
  floppies.  Hm, I can almost get *into* the install program, but
  after some random amount of time, it beeps several times and wedges
  hard.  WTF?  [Support person: Try this older version.]  Doesn't
  work.  [Support person: Try this preinstalled disk.]  Same problem.
  Still don't even know what's wrong, much less how to proceed.

And this is a shop that uses (and hacks on) Another Open Source
Operating System pretty heavily, too.

And I won't even go into how baroque AOSOS's visual configuration tool
is.  B-)

Maybe I'll just port the development environment to NetBSD.