I'm considering buying a Dell Inspiron 17-3721 - the current version of the 17: http://www.dell.com/uk/p/inspiron-17-3721/pd

Can anyone comment on its behaviour with Linux (any distro)? I'm having difficulty tracking down anything definitive in Google-land.

I'd also be interested to hear from anyone who can comment on any distro on any current budget-level 17" laptop.

Thanks,

Adrian

That system probably has UEFI BIOS, and secure boot. So will most other laptops with W8 pre-installed. You need to learn about UEFI BIOS before you will have success installing linux on it.

Here is a link to get you started.

-->http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html

New systems with large disks; > than 2 gig also require GPT disk partitioning. See this link for more info on that.

-->http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/

The other thing to investigate is if the system has Optimus; two video cards; Intel and Nvidia. That can also be "fun" to get working. You can google Optimus to find out more.

I would suggest you search this forum to see what others have run into with UEFI, before you buy anything.

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Thanks Cliff. Looks like useful background.

One query - did you mean 2 gig? Doesn't sound that large...?

[EDIT: Did you mean 2TB? having done a bit of digging that seems about right?]

Adrian

Opps, that should be 2 Tera Bytes. Sorry.

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Thanks :-)