Any Linux Success Stories?

Has anyone tried and successful installed a linux distro on their alienware?

Problems? (Optimus, wifi etc?)

Thanks

I need to install linux on my laptop since I'm using it alot more this semester, so want to know if it was possible or if I should buy a small netbook to do it (or possibly a desktop...which I prefer not to since I'm not home a lot).

 

Not from our side, haven't seen any with the Alienware 14.

 

only "issue" I've seen so far is with the audio. Speakers just not working correctly. Headphones/headsets (audio out) works great. Have not played around with it enough to figure out what the issue is, but it's more than likely a configuration issue with the audio drivers.
Otherwise everything else is working fine. I boot Linux from an mSATA SSD and have windows on a SATA SSD. I have the mSATA set as the boot option and use Grub to select the OS at boot time.

 

I run Arch with gnome as my primary (non-gaming OS) on my M14xR2 and everything is working fine (wifi, hibernation, audio, hdmi out, optimus graphics, etc., etc.). I do recommend against using intelrst caching between the msata drive and your windows drive (mechanical), assuming you share the mechanical drive with linux. I boot windows 8.1/Arch in UEFI mode with grub off of the mechanical disk, and have PC-BSD on my msata drive (things are not as smooth on the BSD side for this hardware - specifically I can't figure out how to get the screen brightness to change). This is all changing when my new msata drive comes in and I'll move windows to that and arch to a dedicated ssd.

PyAlienFX lets you control your keyboard lights (and turn them off ) - it's in the AUR and it's a simple python program that runs in every distro I've tried. I use laptop-mode-tools as well to help with battery life and setup events to change my governor to powersave when unplugged. Battery hovers around 2.5-hours of browsing at low-medium brightness (not as good as windows).