Hi William,
In several years I have not found I need to be picky about PC hardware including laptops, I buy mainly on price and they work. Installing Linux on other people's laptops have also not caused a problem.
On ARM the biggest problem has been continued support for older hardware, e.g Pandaboard A series using openSUSE, Ubuntu or Fedora when upgraded and more usually when a large number of packages are installed, they become unbootable.
I have an ODROID-X and can see support from hardkernel on the wane but for now I have been able to keep it performing though the MAX98090 sound refuses to work but I circumvent that by using USB sound cards. Kernel 3.8.13.19 is fine, 3.8.13.21 eventually freezes and there is no support for later kernels because of hardkernel's "proprietary" but open source bits which can get in a muddle. Furthermore they have told me that support for their hardware will NEVER be part of the mainline kernel.
I have just put the Pandaboard to one side in favour of the Parallella-16 which has a few quirks which hopefully will be fixed so releasing it's full potential.
I still run a Beaglebone White with Ubuntu and building large applications natively such as qt-5 and gnuradio has been possible though it takes a very long time.
Cross compiling is quite messy so I avoid it 100%.
Linus' rant at NVidia was mainly to do with support for their mobile GPU support which was supposed to be open. That has since been resolved, but their x86/x86_64 GPU support has fallen away since Christian Zander left and it still has the infernal proprietary blob whilst still tied to the kernel.
They have said they are contributing to the kernel nouveau driver but looking at the nouveau mailing list posts, there are problems across the board with NVidia GPU's.
As one who uses the latest git kernels using nouveau, 2 or 3 boxes are fine and there is one that with 2 different NVidia GPU's will only work up to 3.14.0 kernels. With 3.15.0-rc kernels this one box will not work properly with KDE, kmix runs but displays no GUI, thundebird comes up but I can't get an email displayed , etc.
I am about to try the NVidia driver but I will probably find, as has been often the case that the driver will not build or work with 3.15.0-rc kernels though we are at 3.14.0-rc5 and heading close to 3.15.0 final. The fix for 3.15.0 may turn out to be trivial but that begs the question as to why NVidia can't keep up.
Ubuntu as ever does strange things. I mainly used openSUSE on x86_64 (3 boxes), Kubuntu 14.04 on 2 x86_64 boxes, Ubuntu 14.04 ARM on BB White, ODROID-X and Linaro Ubuntu 13.10 ARM on Parallella-16.
Regards
Sid.