So I got a good price on a Dell Inspiron with a Haswell i7, 8Gb of RAM, and a 1600x900 display (which is better than most of the laptops in the $500 - $800 range). I didn't feel that I needed a touchscreen, preferring to keep my hands on the keyboard as much as possible.
The Dell Inspiron 17r (5737) came with Windows 8, but since I'm using this as my "dev/ops" machine, I'm going to start from scratch with Ubuntu. Ubuntu 14.04 is due out in a few weeks, so I decided to load the Beta 2 build.
I actually spent a few weeks messing around with 13.10, SmartBoot, UEFI, Legacy Boot, Dual booting with Windows 8.1, etc. I wasn't happy with any of the outcomes, so I finally decided to wipe the drive and start over.
The biggest problem with Ubuntu and the Intel Haswell integrated graphics is the Kernel Mode Setting (KMS). The KMS does not set the display properly, so you end up with a screen that shows red as green, green as magenta, and blue as a tan. Working through this problem using 13.10 and even 14.04, I found that using "nomodeset" or "i915.modeset=0" as a grub boot option would give me a properly-colored desktop, but I lost features of KMS that were important to me, like automatic detecting of HDMI displays.
So here's what I did to get the correct display going on Ubuntu 14.04B2:
Since the KMS wasn't working properly, I loaded a newer kernel that what was installed (3.13.0.22-generic) by Beta 2. I just picked the nightly build to see if the latest worked. I downloaded the .deb files for the headers and kernel from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/drm-intel-nightly/2014-04-05-trusty. Then:
dpkg -i linux*.deb
The kernel loaded with correct KMS configuration (no strange coloring) and nothing extra in the grub options. So I started testing other features. I checked the function keys and found that the brightness setting wasn't changing. I also tested the SD card slot, and other ports. The HDMI port was working as well. So it looks like KMS is finally working like it should.
I then found that the laptop wouldn't recover from suspend. I would get a black screen. So I spent some more time digging and decided I needed to try newer graphics drivers. I found this post and decided to give the oibaf PPA a try.
All it required to get the latest xorg and mesa drivers was:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
The newest drivers have actually fixed the suspend problem. So at this time, the only thing I haven't fixed is the brightness control functions from the keyboard. Since I can just
sudo echo 720 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness
I'm not too concerned about it. Now I can go about setting up the laptop's dev environment for Python and PHP (primarily).