I am new to Ubuntu and would like to buy an Acer S3-391-53314G52 with Windows 7 (has a 20GB SSD and 500GB HDD) and would like to install Ubuntu in dual boot mode.
Has anybody experience with the hardware and know if it will work? Anything to be careful about?
there is no "damage" of hidden recovery-partition possible (partition of M$) - yes, it is possible to delete the recovery-partition - but it can be re-awakened by simple bios-update before you reinstall then after bios-update with Windows 7 (only necessary when you want to give up Linux/Unix installation) - but warning here, dont do bios-update of UEFI-Bios ! - when anything is working fine with installed Linux already before. a bios-update is not ultimately necessary and has no effect to performance. so no need "to fix somthing, where nothing is broken".
The question is old, but I just installed Ubuntu Studio 20.04 on a Acer Aspire S3-391 with Windows 10, I didn't find any problem:
It works like a charm!
it depends what tricks the newer Uefi-Bios has now.
You have to adjust Uefi-Bios for Ubuntu-allowed installation to efi-mode resp. to legacy-mode.
It is explained here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI
The acer S3 is not an absolutely brandy-hot-new model, so you should have luck with this link. But probably it does not work to install both windows and ubuntu together onto the partition where only 20 GB SDD is located. To get the maximum of it, I would install Ubuntu completely onto that notebook and try to use Windows 8 in virtualbox of Ubuntu. You can get virtualbox at http://virtualbox.org - when you are clever: send back acer S3 to acer technical support and express your wish to want windows 7 instead of windows 8 - then you would have less problems with virtualbox and windows 7. But I dont know if you would get installation-DVD for Windows 7 from acer. In the end you could demand, that they delete Windows 8 and you get some money back and have then acer S3 completely free for Ubuntu ...
Another thing to watch out for. Sometimes laptops come with a hidden recovery partition to restore to factory settings. If you install grub then it could damage some of the possibility of ever using this feature. So just make sure you backup the laptop so you can get it back to the factory settings if necessary.
