Ive had good luck with Acer's, plus we havent seen many in the shop for repairs. Asus would be my next choice for a laptop. We see more HP and Dell laptops in the shop for hardware issues, their consumer grade stuff is just cheap. Dell and HP have good commercial grade stuff.

I run Ubuntu on all my gear and dual boot Ubuntu and Widows 7 on my netbook. Most MS Office programs can run on Ubuntu with PlayOnLinux, although Access and Outlook will not.