Zareason and System76 will ship to the UK, but, when it comes to the VAT etc., you are on your own.

yea we looked at the US sources but i dont want to go that way. Expensive & i assume they are custom kernals pre-installed and therefore i may not be able to install the multitude of different distros that i do.

But why does ubuntu certified list have no results for standard ubuntu images ? How can i check anything.
https://certification.ubuntu.com/des...vendors=Crambo

Looking through the mint certified list just now. Had to have a few hours break cos this search is really hurting my head lol
https://community.linuxmint.com/hardware/search

Really not into gambling £xxx but looking more and more like i might just have to do just that.

ok can anyone fault this choice:-

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Acer-Aspir...YAAOSwB09YDkbw
https://community.linuxmint.com/hardware/view/26519

Inspiron's are mentioned a lot on the certified lists, I can not see this particular one but i can see 5545 is certified by mint and loads of inspiron's on the ubuntu list (but they might be referring to pre-installed by manufacture). However this is another option:-
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DELL-Inspi...kAAOSwtnpXm2jU

bed for me, start again tomorrow.

I've got the older & lower spec E5-571, triple booting Win 8.1 (for work), Slackware 14.2 and FreeBSD.

FreeBSD still doesn't support the ACPI hardware properly, meaning that thermal monitoring doesn't work at all and power management is a little flaky.

On the Linux side, I've not had many problems. Most things seem to be properly supported. Suspend/resume works superbly. Bluetooth has problems, but I don't use it much anyway. Wifi works flawlessly and power management works well.

The Acer is a nice laptop. You'll need to run a pretty new kernel on it because of the Skylake, but other than that I've heard good things.

I'm not a fan of Inspiron's. They have a tendency to have low resolution LCD's (I HATE 1366x768 LCD's), and they tend to use Broadcom wireless (which can be made to work, but has pretty poor linux support).

Well that was a futile attempt at sleep :-/

So thats 2 votes for the acer so that'll do for me. looks like kernel 4.4 should be ok and of course they are continually working on it.

I have just had a thought though, what about win7 will it work, can i assume microsoft are still supporting this architecture for a bit with win7?

Dont know if i dare google "linux aspire E5-574G" because im sure it does not matter what machine im looking at i'll find people complaining about problems so i think i shall just go with it.

Thank you all for the support, will let you know how it goes.

Win7 will be supported until 2020. If I were you, IF you wanted to keep Windows, create a recovery USB as soon as you get it, and recover it from USB leaving 1/2 the primary hard drive unformatted so that you can install linux.

Of course, I would probably create a recovery USB, put it aside for if/when I sold the laptop so I could Windows back on, then blow away the entire drive and put linux on.

Id normally nuke anything thats on a comp when first getting it regardless (especially if second-hand or referb) but i might take a quick look at win 8.1 as iv never seen it before but yea making a recovery disk/usb/partition is a good idea even if the chances of me ever selling a machine are remote to bupkis but there’s always a chance it has to go back (touch wood i have not cursed it now).

EDIT:- Oh 8.1 was on the other comp. (its 04:30 in morning )

You won't miss anything. Win 8/8.1 was, without a program called classic shell installed (which made them act exactly like Windows 7), were the worst Windows versions EVER released IMO.

what even worse than vista ? wow thats pretty bad.

Worse than Vista, worse than ME. Yeah, it was that bad.

but then theres win 10 and thats a whole other level of bad. I have not used it but thats because i read all the bad news flying around about it when it was being forced apon everyone and i hold privacy in high regard.

It takes a while to make Windows 10 be acceptable levels of security, but it can be done. M$ HAS actually made it easier with the newest versions, surprisingly.

I understand that 10 is actually very good as OS's go but i think they let people see their colours a little to clearly during the 10 role-out. Im open to being completely wrong on this one but reading about the data collection of just about everything you do including keylogers screen shots and massive metadata continually being sent back to M$ is not such a great "feature". I dont know if it was all hype I dont know if they have started backtracking but what i do know is with out 10 I would never have started my migration of all my machines over to linux. So in a way i have to thank win10 (every cloud ... ).