Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

Here is a question (sorry to try and hijack this thread): this is a great laptop, but while we're at it, have people had good experiences with other ultrabooks?

My experience has been that things like EFI have made it impossible to boot linux on recent macbooks (I have tried!), and many ultrabook hardware just doesn't work on linux. Graphics won't show up, the thing won't boot, SATA hard drives not found, etc.

Many of the websites I used to rely on (eg, linux-laptop.net) have very out of date information. Ubuntu has a list of certified machines (http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/) but still, it doesn't tell me much about ultrabooks released in the past year.

Are there any new resources I'm missing? Or personal experiences people can share?

As for myself, I'm successfully running Mint on a Toshiba Portege ultrabook. But that is the flimsiest computer I've ever used!

FWIW, I use an ASUS Zenbook (quite a popular ultrabook) to run Ubuntu and it works fine.

EDIT: But I did have to fiddle a little to get the clickpad working properly

For the near-1kg range: Samsung Series 9 (NP900X3C-A01US)

Ubuntu 12.04.1 installs & runs without modification, but some minor Fn keys didn't work (e.g., WiFi toggle button).

Arch Linux with systemd installs & runs fine, and it had great battery life because 'rfkill block all' seems to more thoroughly power-down those circuits on Arch than Ubuntu. (well over 7 hours with wired ethernet, plus Emacs and Firefox in heavy use)

I have the NP900X3C-A04US which is similar, but has slightly upgraded specs.

> Ubuntu 12.04.1 installs & runs without modification, but some minor Fn keys didn't work (e.g., WiFi toggle button).

This doesn't even work on Windows without their crap-ware.

I made a copy of their installation files, uninstalled it, and now run it only when I need to use those FN keys (that is - very rarely).

Other than this and the 4GB of RAM ... this is absolutely the most perfect laptop I have ever put my hands on and even beats out the Apple MacBook Air (which I sold after getting this).

I have one of these. The hardware is completely supported on Debian but I couldn't handle the shallow keyboard, so I went back to my Thinkpad. Probably would feel the same about any Ultrabook though. I miss the glorious screen but the keyboard is more important.

I have a Sony Z series, and it works reasonably well. The external dock/graphics card thing that connects via LightPeak is very cool but doesn't work at all on Linux. (To be fair, it doesn't work under Windows 8 either :P), but apart from that, it's been a great laptop.

It's possible (and fairly easy) to boot linux (at least ubuntu) on my own macbook air 2011. I bet it's doable on any newer mac.

My ThinkPad X201 is great for the most part. There are some issues with the wifi. The wifi icon will sometimes disappear so I have to manually restart nm-applet. I also have a tough time connecting to public wifi (or the connection is dead when I'm connected), which other computers connect to easily.

EFI / Macs / Linux - check out rEFIt: http://refit.sourceforge.net/ (however, I haven't used it in a while, and I notice that the latest news on the site is from 2010...)

I have tried rEFIt! On my late 2011 MBP I was not able to get it to work.

So either I was installing and configuring it wrong (definitely possible) or it just doesn't work any more. (Or maybe a combination of both. This is the life of an open source zealot i'm afraid.)

:( sad to hear that rEFIt no longer works. I've never got a dual boot OS X / Gentoo console-only laptop working, but it was always my dream. So sad OS X can't boot into a console mode.