Basically the one concern I had was whether or not a certain distro would support my hardware.

If you're not running x86, this might be a concern. Otherwise, it's probably just a matter of configuration. One quick way to figure out what your machine needs in terms of configuration hardware-wise, is to pop in a Knoppix CD, which is widely regarded as being one of, if not the best for detecting and configuring hardware, take a look at the modules it loads, and poke around through /proc. Then it's a pretty simple thing to duplicate that set-up with any other distro. YMMV, of course.