[maxs]

Another vote for ASUS U31SD!!! (I am also excited like a teenage girl about this laptop!)

I bought it for $650 from Amazon almost a year ago. It is not really an Ultrabook. But, I think it is perfect. The screen size is a 13", it is incredibly light, yet still has a full-size keyboard, all ports you will ever need, and quite A LOT of power (4Gb RAM expandable to 8Gb, 2 cores, 4 hardware threads). I use Ubuntu with Unity, with a lot of browser windows, a heavyweight IDE (NetBeans), lots of terminal windows and it works very snappy. It also never gets hot. The battery life is terrific.. 7-8 hours!

I didn't buy an SSD yet, but I intend to, in a few years when they get cheaper.

I dual boot Windows for gaming, and I've even played some relatively recent video games (like Just Cause 2, Mass Effect 3), with maxed-out resolution on an external monitor. Works like a charm.

[aeeeee]

Nice! Happy to hear that there is another person running Linux. I honestly get a good 10 hours (or at least that's what the power manager reports). It boots so fast with SSD I don't think I'll ever go back :)