I would personally recommend a Samsung Series 7 15.6" laptop. It has a super thin bezel around the screen so it form factor is more like a 14" laptop. It is less than an inch thick, and is very portable. Mine has an 17-2675QM quad core in it, and it is expandable to 12gigs of ram(4 gigs is soldered on the motherboard). It also has a radeon 6750m in it. But most importantly, it has a 1600x900 MATTE display. I run only ubuntu 12.10 on it, and it does take some configuration out of the box to get set up right, but a quick google search is all it took. Few minor things don't work on mine, but overall I am extremely happy with it.