The problem is that it will take you at least a few hours' commitment to find compatible hardware. If you'd also like to buy a box at a good value, the problem becomes exponentially harder.

Hardware compatibility is getting better, for sure. The biggest glaring hole is Linux support for USB wireless peripherals (something a majority of home desktop computers use nowadays). Also, software support for the 64-bit architecture lags behind support for 32-bit architecture despite the fact that every new box is going to have more than 4 gigs of RAM in a year or two.

For 64 bit architecture, the only big hole I found was the flash player -- it's simply broken, even with the npviewer plugin.

As far as wired networks/desktop hardware goes, I find that things Just Work(tm). Laptops, yeah. You do need to google, or buy with Linux preinstalled. thankfully, there are more and more places that sell Linux laptops these days.

Amazon's MP3 downloader and the most recent student version of Matlab also do not support 64 bit architecture.

Most of the stuff in the repositories is good on 64 bit, much of everything else is not.

Hm. Never used the MP3 downloader myself, and Octave has been sufficiently compatible (ie, every bit of code I've encountered/written worked on both) for me to do all the Matlab courses and assignments that I've worked on. I suppose that I should have qualified my original statement -- all the software I cared about as an engineering-physics/computer science student that ran on Linux in the first place runs just fine on Linux 64 bit. (I miss CAD and a good GUI circuit designer, but those were also missing from 32 bit Linux)