I need a brand new notebook. I was considering at first Asus N550JV, however it's being replaced now by Asus N550JK -- it's pretty fresh, no tests, no guides, no reviews available for now.. I gave it a shot - just ordered it yesterday.
When I was looking for information about Asus N550JV it was quite painful that nobody kept all the information in one place -- I'll try to describe and keep all the information related to Linux on N550JK installation/configuration here! Let me know if you want to contribute, I'm also open to your suggestions - I'm not going to test everything here, because it will be my primary computer for everyday use - but hey, give it a try!
I ordered 128 GB SSD / 16 GB RAM / Win 8.1 variant. I want to clone SSD drive for backup purposes, to shrink the windows partition to make a space for Linux filesystem and also to remove optical drive and put on its place HDD caddy with secondary hard drive (traditional, non-SSD) for /home and /swap. I hope it'll work just fine. ;-)
One of the first things I'll check is SATA controller for optical drive -- I need to be sure in which mode it operates SATA 2 or SATA 3 to choose secondary hard drive properly.
Here you can find the notes for installation/configuration for Asus N550JV (thanks for them once again, Lîtus!) just in case. As my Linux distribution I choose Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS. What's yours?
Cheers!
K