I'm running Ubuntu on a Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus (http://www.samsung.com/global/ativ/ativbook9plus.html) with no issues and battery life is good. Nearly all media keys worked out of the box, as well as wifi.
1. Some of the media keys don't work on Windows 8, even with Samsung software (laptop shipped with Windows 7, and they offered limited support with Windows 8).
2. The touchpad is awful. I can click on some right sides of the touchpad and it left clicks, or sometimes it right clicks when I click on the left side. My old netbook and dell laptops had much better touchpads. Thankfully, the touchpad is rarely used.
3. Usb or mini hdmi devices sometimes disconnect if I wiggle or bump the plug.
4. Ports are too close together. I have 3 or 4 flash drives (some fairly slim - http://www.testberichte.de/imgs/p_imgs/Mushkin+Ventura+Pro+%...), and none of them fit in the left port, because they hit the power cable. In the right port, they're also tight if I have headphones plugged in. You really need to be careful with the cables and devices you own, because you only have a millimeter or two of clearance between them.
5. The power cable on the side is annoying. When I move the laptop when it's plugged in, the cable always wants to fold under the device. I guess it's better than my dell, where the cable would pull out the back at the slightest movement.
6. Battery life is poor. I keep the battery saver enabled, which only charges the device to 80%. It goes from 80% to dead in about 1 to 1.5 hours, with just general browsing on the internet.
On the plus side, the screen is perfect, it's extremely lightweight, very quiet, it's now my favorite keyboard, and it's fast enough for everyday work. So, it has flaws, but it's the best laptop I've owned to date, and I'd either buy the newer model or one of apple's offerings the next time around.
Only difficulty you might run into is adapting applications to scale text and graphics up, as the screen's DPI is very high. For example, Chrome's bars (navigation, tabs and bookmarks) are still sized in fixed number of pixels and look painfully small.