I'm very happy with the Asus UX31A (from the Zenbook series).

It works fine on Ubuntu 14.04 here, including wlan, suspend-to-RAM (I haven't tried suspend-to-disc, since I have no swap partition), function keys (backlight, keyboard backlist, switch off trackpad etc.).

Battery lifetime is -- in typical office workload, including wlan -- between 3.5 and 5H, mostly depending on backlight setting.

And I guess that's common to most SSD-equipped notebooks, but bootup is really fast (haven't measured it, but probably ~8s).

(Just a small note: to install linux, you first must remove all "secure boot" keys in the bios, then disable secure boot; windows 8 still worked fine afterwards).