In the past, sound problems involving ALSA or OSS were highly prolific on Linux help forums. The sound system simply did not work well enough out of the box for quite a long time. Now, with the advent of dmix in ALSA and the proliferation of sound servers like PulseAudio, sound seems to be pretty well worked out. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about suspend and resume.
Having a laptop that will not suspend to memory is nearly as inhibiting as having one with no battery. The reality is that, yes, my Vostro 1000 is getting pretty old. You would think that after numerous kernel, driver, and HAL/DeviceKit releases that a three to four year old laptop would exhibit a very high degree of compatibility. While this is the case for most parts of the Linux kernel, video drivers and the ability to suspend have always been unstable and unpredictable. I don't think I have ever upgraded a release of Ubuntu or Fedora without something on this laptop ceasing to work properly.
The first issue is that I have to use versions of the ati/radeon xorg video modules from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) since the newer ones available in Karmic simply will not allow me to wake up from a suspend to memory. All it presents the user with is a black screen of death. The second issue is the seemingly amazing ability of suspend to bounce back and forth from functioning perfectly to poorly with every kernel release. I'm not going to go into any details here, but I will say that I think focusing some development time on improving the suspend and resume experience on laptops and netbooks could go a long way in avoiding the loss of adventurous new users trying Linux for the first time.
I should also note that I have been unable to use the binary AMD-provided fglrx module since Ubuntu 8.10 since they stopped supporting the Radeon XPress in my laptop. I'd have to say that Intrepid was probably the most compatible release of Ubuntu for this particular laptop when taking everything into account. After forcing an install of the older video drivers from Jaunty suspend and resume appears to work reliably. This all comes after placing a new 32GB SSD drive and $30 battery into the aging laptop and it feels like it has some life in it again!