Whether Linux supports laser mice (which I take as beeing optical mice) depends on kernel configuration. Take a really old linux distro and try to use usb devices on it. It is probably disabled by default, due to kernel code marked EXPERIMENTAL.
There should be nothing special about the mouse using another technology detecting movement, that's completely off topic! The mouse will work if the kernel supports what is jacked in, optical or not.
I have used Linux for a desktop myself for a while, then switched back to Windows because of instability of KDE at the time (mandrake).
I have learned to love linux as a server. Today I have scripted backups systems transferring only the data that has been changed over the Internet through a secure SSH tunnel every day. It is a 60 MB database and some CVS repositories, settings and such. Complete backup is often finished within a minute or two, even though we're downloading the backups through an ISDN connection. It sweet!
Recently got a new Acer aspire 1703 SM laptop from work. Windows XP on it. Since I use Zend studio client and server for PHP development, I decided to give Windows a try for a development environment.
But I am not satisfied, since the shell sucks in windows (better in XP though) and secure systems are harder to setup (and come from the open source community :LOL:).
Conclusion...
If only every PC-game was available for Linux, my Internet bank supported mozilla, and people realised IE isn't very good so I wouldn't have to test my work on it, I would leave Windows for good, and I would not want to support people having trouble with it either.
One more thing though for all you guys afraid of email viruses using windows. Use some flavour of
http://www.mozilla.org mail instead. That'll get you away from most such threats. Unless you're not careful enough and doubleclick those .exe attachments. Don't...
Learning Linux makes Windows more and more of a PAIN. Even though I knew it before Linux and has always been there... (well... not always.)
And YES! I have experience from windows servers as well. I don't do that anymore, because I don't want to use software that any day can become unsupported and I have to pay $20 000 to get a newer version. I don't like systems that can't do ssh hostname "grep googlebot /var/log/apache/accesslog"
AARGH!
I have contributed to (or made it into) one of those completely useless flame wars!
God forgive me!
twigletmac too...