I have a Samsung R580 laptop with dualboot Linux Mint 10 and Windows 7 Home Premium.
My main operating system is Linux Mint and I keep Windows 7 for the occasional gaming.
Linux Mint works perfectly with my laptop including the builtin camera as well as hibernate and suspend.
I use the GNOME desktop environment for its simplicity, stability and customisability.
I use Firefox as my main web browser. I love the huge number of useful extensions it has.
I have tried Chrome and Opera but they don't have the customisability and huge number of addons that
Firefox does.
The Firefox extensions I consider necessary are Adblock Plus, Flashblock, Noscript, Tab Mix Plus, Video Downloadhelper, and Scrapbook.