Well I certainly appreciate the help, but I wasn't really asking for help. Trying to determine if things will work correctly just by looking at the components used is a whole lot of work and isn't very reliable - I had a Toughbook, for example, with an audio chip that worked fine in Linux, but only if I used headphones. I couldn't get anything at all over the system speakers.
It also doesn't tell you anything about how the components work together - if the drivers aren't all in sync the system won't suspend correctly, for example. It's also difficult to tell if a component only partially works - I recall having a problem with a touchpad at one point where its basic functionality was there, but I couldn't get the scrolling areas to register at all. There used to be a problem with battery life in Linux as well, though I think that one has been largely resolved.
Anyway, these are all things that matter and when the nice people at Anandtech are doing a review of, for example, Razor's new fourteen inch Blade, they're things that I would like to know. Just a little section where they install some standard distro and run through its paces, then let us know what works and what doesn't.
This is particularly applicable to gaming laptops partly, I'll grant, because those are the ones that I am interested in, but partly because SteamOS is now available as what will likely become the gaming distro of choice and gives a standard by which they can measure. No need to install OpenSUSE and Mandrake and Ubuntu, etc., and test each one. Just let us know what does and doesn't work in SteamOS and we'll figure the rest out on our own. I'm thinking (all right, hoping) that SteamOS will become a rather large part of PC gaming in the next few years and any laptop that I buy now is going to have to work for me for multiple years, so this is relevant information.
Yes I can make use of paperwastage's link, and that's appreciated, but ultimately it's not much better than searching through forums. I'd like all the info to be right there in the review. That's what a review is for, after all: to provide information on whether or not the reader should make a purchase.