If your laptop is running KDE or Gnome, Network Manager is the default network connection. This application has known bugs in KDE, the worst are with wireless. I would recommend using wicd. It installs very easily and just works, most of the time (wireless can require manual configuration, but they are getting much better at auto detecting). Also, try plunging a cable in if you are wireless.

Back to the topic, Linux is Linux and the what distro is pretty much which package manager you like best. Even with Gentoo, you don't see much difference once you are set up. Gentoo's Portage is very efficient, Slackware's pkgtools is completely manual, Ubuntu's Synaptic is a friendly gui, and Sabayon's Entropy miss manages quite a few dependency. It is mostly personal choice. The packages provided are also important. Slackware and, to some extend, Debian provide older software that is extensively tested. Ubuntu is faster, which is why they split from Debian, but they are still slow. Gentoo is on the edge, which can cause minor stability problems. Sabayon tries to be right on the bleeding edge, but they tend to have minor testing issues. Recently, they mixed there testing and stable branches up, but it was rather minor.
Most "upgrades" provided by distros like Ubuntu are just new versions of the gui and a bunch of minor files. The kernel is updated frequently. Gentoo constantly updates its software, so it has no version. You just update files as they become available.

The final question is what style you like: slow and proven stable, or new and stable. I like new and stable because newer software has bug fixes, more features, and its the one the developers expect to generate bug reports. My experience is that a computer geek would want a system that is stable, but allows tinkering to perfect the performance, ease of setting up your own scripts (like my firewall), etc.