At some point I installed Ubuntu, and it gave the laptop a whole new life, HOWEVER... for me it always needed some crazy things to be done in the terminal in order to make things work properly, the wifi, the bluetooth or something else, at some point just broke, and it was a little field day everytime to make it work again.
I still have it and it still works OK!
So does Linux on laptop work well? Yes. It works TOO well? In my opinion, NO, it really depends sometimes.
But I believe it's a great O.S.