I'm excited about a company that will ensure a good, compatible experience with linux on a laptop. I develop on mac osx and linux vms (vagrant). I want to move to linux but the linux desktop experience just isn't there yet.
There's nothing I want to do I can't do on Linux as well or better, except play games, and that's not enough of a factor for me to not prefer Linux.
I pretty much have no reason to reboot into Windows. I used to reboot for Netflix, but now it works in recent Chrome versions on Linux.
That said, I've used Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1995 (but always with a backup Windows partition), so I'm not the ideal person to look to for whether Linux is ready for the desktop...it's been ready for my desktop for a couple decades. But, I think now I'm at a point where I don't feel any need to have a Windows partition, for anything.
But even for a laptop this prevalent, getting it to work with Ubuntu is a pain, and you run into a bunch of little bugs consistently.
I understand that it's a major uphill battle, but over the many many laptops I've tried to use with Linux, I've not found one that offers a good experience when it comes to the things that are important to a laptop (like battery life, secondary display support, and the like).
I'm totally cool with using Linux on a desktop (though I don't own a desktop anymore), had some great experiences even when going full Arch.
The hassle involved in getting Ubuntu working on a MacBook is not representative of laptop installations in general. Macs are special beasts and looking at the relevant support wiki page there are all sorts of hoops that I just didn't have to jump through in either of my non-Mac installations. I'm sorry you had a poor experience!
Having issues with a sound card gives me flashback to windows 95.
I have a friend who has a zenbook, was pretty unimpressed by the build quality, but that might have been a lower end model.
I'm always curious why people talk about needing battery life so often. Only thing I can think of is if you fly overseas often you would need great battery life, but a mac wouldn't cover that use case either. Where are people going that they aren't within a few feet of an outlet when they are computing?
At least the starbucks around my area don't have that many plugs either.
Another advantage of having such a long battery life is that I basically can go anywhere after work (where I do have a charger) and not worry about plugging it in at all until the next day. Also, not having to carry around my charger makes carrying around my laptop great.
It's definitely a priority thing, and also dependent on lifestyle. In college there were power outlets basically everywhere so I didn't have the issue, but ever since I've started working in various spots not having to look for the power outlet has been a net benefit.
One time I looked into getting a macbook for the nice hardware and running Arch on it, and quickly nope'd out of there. That is not a project for the faint of heart.
And I don't want an office suite, or movie recorder, or any of that crap. But I want the Gnome Terminal, or other pretty terminal where I have font smoothing or whatever that is called. I know I can do this with Arch, but I'm not a systems guy, I'm a developer, and I don't want to have to learn about all the systems crap. I just want a shell that is pleasant to look at, my fatigue is so much less when looking at pleasant non offensive colours.