Looking at getting a new laptop/notebook which I'd like to dual boot in order to do most of my scientific work, primarily Python programming and tex file writing, on a Linux distro (open to suggestions for which might be best for the hardware).

I've picked out the £699 one in the link below as a possible, as I'd like a half decent graphics card for playing a few Steam games on the Windows side.

http://shop.lenovo.com/gb/en/laptops...#tab-customize

Does anyone have any experience trying to load a Linux OS on to this machine or something fairly similar that they could share with me to help me decide if this is the right one for me?

I don't know if you'll bump into anyone who does, but in general you want to avoid Nvidia (you can Google the founder of Linux's opinion on the matter, it's quite vibrant), and see if the Wi-Fi card is known to cause issues in linux

Also, if it is 10 sticker tested, beware that it is unclear on whether that means Secure Boot can be turned off, and if it is 8 sticker tested, you can run Linux, but you'll need to turn Secure Boot off.

If what you're doing will not be resource intensive, you might want to consider just setting up a Virtual Machine.

Good luck!

I'm not too worried about having the Nvidia graphics card running within the Linux boot - I'm happy with the less powerful integrated graphics as any programs that I'll want the card working for will be run on the Windows side. So would having a Nvidia card still be a problem for me?

You probably could get Linux to run ok (as in working for your applications as you want Linux for), but it can be a mess with nouveau drivers that may come with the distro and to install the Nvidia graphics card drivers if need be. When I googled that "Nvidia GeForce 840M" I saw a few forums about people who had trouble, as well as drivers from Nvidia that probably wouldn't run too bad.

Recently, I've had a particularly bad experience setting up Linux on a relatives computer with Nvidia, but that was on a Compaq Presario that's 6 years old. But I do see a decent amount of people on here asking for help with Nvidia graphics card. Especially if you have experience with Linux, you probably can make it work, but it may be ugly. Hopefully someone else who's dealt with more recent or similar Nvidia cards can provide specific advice for that card. You may want to start a new thread with its title having the name of your graphics card to get an Nvidia expert's attention.

Point of correction from my last post - Linux can be ran on at least 8's Secure Boot with a kernel that has certain keys from Microsoft, but it's an unnecessary pain as you can just turn Secure Boot and UEFI off.

And https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0r6Pr_mdio

Hi, just installed Netrunner 16 on a Lenovo Flex 2-15, dual boot with Win 8.1. Until now it seems working fine, just cannot directly execute dual boot, because grub is not able to boot windows. The only workaround is to enter, every time I want to launch a different os from the one currently running, into boot device and make the proper choice.
Due to some oddities while reading the installation dvd, I was able to see only Netrunner or OpenSuse13.2, but not Slackware 14.1 (yes, I tried leaving off secure mode, but with no good result).
So I installed Netrunner (secure boot mode on an UEFI): not tested everything but network, sound, touchscreen all work fine.
By the way Netrunner is quite a ready out of the box distro with steam games too.
For now,I have to investigate how to use Nvidia.
Hope this is useful.

Although me talking about this almost belongs to a different thread, Slackware probably wasn't detected as it uses the archaic LILO instead of GRUB 2. You probably could manually add it in with some configuration files or GRUB commands. GRUB should be able to start the Windows bootloader from the menu if you change its configuration.