I got a Asus Zenbook UX32vd a few years and I'm still very satisfied. Good Linux support and a nice screen and keyboard. The mouse pad could be more responsive though.
Recommends itOwned 2 yearsStill going
The ASUS Zenbook line is probably the closest thing to Apple hardware you can get on the windows side of things. They have fairly powerful ultrabooks with similar style/form factor to Macs that you can get with SSDs and dedicated graphics. I personally have a UX32VD that came with Windows 8 that I run linux on. The machine is primarily aluminum, and is slightly thicker and heavier than a Macbook air. It has backlit chiclet style keys with an almost identical to Macbook layour, and a single button, multi-touch trackpad. It has a 1080p IPS screen in a 13" form factor, which means pixel density and colors are pretty good. The build quality is not as high as Apple, but its better than most PC manufacturers and I have been happy with the machine. I bought it a couple years ago, and I was able to get an i7 processor, a 256GB SSD, 12GB RAM, and dedicated nVidia graphics for ~$1300. The one con is battery life. I get about 4 hours, but this could probably be improved with a less intensive newer generation processor.
Recommends it
+1 for Zenbooks. I have a UX32VD, with 12 GB RAM and an i7 and it runs all of the distros I've tried with minimal problems and setup. I've run different versions of Ubuntu and Arch on it with no real issues, and the battery life is decent for its weight and thickness as well. The 1080p screen in the small form factor is also really nice.
Likes it
This is the main reason I bought the Zenbook UX32VD. The 1920x1080 resolution on a 13" screen is amazing! It's not glossy either, which is a huge plus.
Likes it
It does take some tinkering to get things setup right, but on my Asus Zenbook UX32VD I do get ~5 hours of battery life for simple usage, which is the same as the advertised battery life with Windows. This is running Ubuntu 13.04 with the latest linux kernel (3.9.6 atm), laptop-mode, bbswitch to turn off the discrete graphics card, power saving mode on for the wifi card etc. IMO its paramount to be running recent kernels, both for good battery life as well as compatibility with the latest hardware.
Recommends it
I'm using the Asus UX32VD with extra 8 GB of RAM and a Samsung SSD. Everything except the Nvidia Optimus works perfectly. I'm running Ubuntu 13.04 and with downgraded xserver-xorg-core (1.13.3-0ubuntu2b1) the Bumblebee works just fine and I can play my daily dose of Minecraft. Everything else works like I said: perfectly. I love the gorgeous display (1080p IPS), as good as Macbook's keyboard and a pretty nice touchpad. The only problems I've had was the upgrade of xserver-xorg-core, which broke the Bumblebee support once. I hope that there will be a bit more stable solution for running the second GPU.
Recommends it
I have a Zenbook and love it. Would recommend the UX32VD over the UX31, as you can upgrade the SSD and the RAM. (Jeff Atwood actually uses the UX32VD - he gave the UX31 to his wife.)