Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Wow! Thoroughly impressed by this ultrabook. At $699, this is a steal. I've been using it for 1 day so far, so these are my first impressions. TL;DR: At $699, this is a steal. Works great as a linux laptop. 10/10 machine. Linux Compatibility - 9/10 The first thing I did was remove Windows 8.1 and replace it with Linux. I currently am running Ubuntu 14.10. Everything has worked out of the box except for 2 minor things: the brightness control using the function key (fn+f5, fn+f6) and some text display issue. I solved the brightness control by installing xbacklight (sudo apt-get install xbacklight) and mapping xbacklight -dec 10 to the F3 key and xbacklight -inc 10 to the F4 key. Also, on occasion, the display of text messes up. This is usually fixed with by simply adjusting the size of the window. This may be caused by me installing themes and not using the default theme. I have also installed Cinnamon desktop environment and it works great. I am using the Unity de currently though. There are no obvious power drains or inefficiencies using Linux on this machine. It also uses the SSD very well and starts up from cold in just a few seconds. Amazing! Wi-Fi works perfectly right out of the box. No tweaking. No hassles. Battery - 10/10 The battery life is phenomenal. I have seen 7 hours of intense usage at varying brightness levels and my battery still has ~1 hour left. Graphics - 10/10 Graphics performance is great so far. Plays 1080p video exceptionally well. This 1080p screen is amazing. Performance-10/10 I am a web developer/programmer. I have set up my development environment and it handles everything easily, as expected. I frequently use 30 tabs on Google Chrome, multiple instances of IDEs (Sublime Text, WebStorm) and Terminal emulators as well. No problem for this machine. The machine does get warm at the back/bottom since there is no fan. The area where I rest my palms remains nice and cool. Therefore, it is not a big deal. Do note that I have not attempted photo/video editing yet, nor do I intend to.