Best Ultrabook for Linux?

On the other hand, NVidia proprietary drivers actually work better than ATI drivers.

I suggest Intel because of the lower power consumption.

Not sure if this is helpful but I was looking for the same thing about six months ago and ended up buying a macbook air, decided to give OSX a chance and stuck with it. As far as I'm aware most of the things are compatible but trackpad support isn't quite there yet.

Last December I bought a ASUS U31 (U31SD-A1 Intel Core i3 2310M 2.10GHz 13.3" 4GB Memory 640GB HDD NVIDIA GeForce GT 520M) and I absolutely love it. I don't know if the same model is available but I would definitely look into it if you can find it. For Linux I use Mint and you although it uses the Optimus stuff for video bumblebee works great. You don't need to run in NVidia mode to get 3D effects either I only use bumblebee to turn it off. I get 10hours+ of battery life, the keyboard is awesome (chicklet style). I did replace the internal drive with an SSD drive which makes it boot much faster, less than 5 seconds. Also dual boot windows for games and the NVidia graphics are great for that.

EDIT: removed some of my !!!!s since they made this sound like it was written by a teenage girl. (I really do love this laptop)

Considering the price ultrabooks are being sold for, I'd suggest a Macbook Air. From their spec sheet, they should be well supported and they are exceedingly well built and the screen is the best 13" out there.

I must admit, however, I'm not convinced by this ultrabook "trend". It looks a lot like PC makers got tired to compete in price in the netbook range and wanted to beef up the hardware a little and increase their margins. For that, however, they had to invent a new category.

Not an ultra; but I was looking for something similar, I think to what you were looking for.

Small, but still useable, light, fast, good build quality and hopefully cheap.

I did a alot of research and watched slickdeals.com regularly for deals and ended up with an Asus 1215b with an E-350 processor. It comes with 2gb of ram, but I put another 4gb stick (22$) to bring it to 6; and replaced the hard drive with an ssd ($100).

all in all I have about 450 bucks into it and it's great. Everything works in linux; but graphic drivers aren't quite upto snuff. With windows 720p played fine; on linux it is sometimes jumpy; even with hardware acceleration.

It has no optical drive (a feature for me). It also has usb 3.0 which was a must-have for me.

Main downside is that the touchpad has a flaw and you have to fix it yourself. If you are going to put in an SSD anyway (and you should/have to) you will beable to fix it while you are doing that. Otherwise its like a 5-10 minute fix depending on how comfortable you are taking apart laptops.

The other big downside is that replacing the hard drive voids the warranty (or at least, you have to break through a sticker that says if tthis sticker is broken the warranty is void).

But all in all I am super happy with this laptop. The function keys work, the wireless is solid; with an SSD it boots up in seconds; everything is lightning fast. Only a dual 1.6 ghz so if you are doing lots of heavy compiling it isn't probably not for you.

I have not done much gaming on it; I have played a little bit of heroes of newerth on ultra low settings and it was playable.