I agree with you for the most part and MOST of the linux stuff I'll do at work is from the VirtualBox VMs I have running from within Windows. But at home I really need the smooth Desktop experience with no graphics lag and shaky windows. I installed ...
I got Linux Mint 13 working on it using the Ubuntu UEFI Boot instructions at:https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBootingand then creating a boot entry for Grub from the Laptop's BIOS which has a nice option of adding EFI boot entries. IMO that is a...