This hardware is highly compatible with Linux. I am using Arch on this, and everything works out of the box --- no special drivers were needed.It seems to be reasonably fast, and the only downside for me is the screen brightness. While I think it is sharp enough, it is less bright than I care for. (However, others that used this screen find it more to their taste in terms of brightness, so this is very much a matter of opinion rather than fact.)The real pleasure here of course the price; a 15.6 screen, 128 gigabyte SSD, an I3 processor, and 8 gigabytes of memory are quite good specs for a $400 machine.