[stormbrew]

> UEFI and secure boot and on and on... It's not ~2005-2011 anymore, laptops are a lot more complicated and more diverse than they used to be a very short time ago.

I think rather the opposite is true. The post-ultrabook era has seen an increasingly uniform PC laptop environment. There are far more laptops you can buy now that are well set up to run linux than ever before because the parts are less likely to come from TinyCompany Electronics, LLC. Taiwan and more likely to come from, say, Intel. An Ultrabook-labelled laptop post-2011 is practically guaranteed to do a good job with linux.