Quick feedback - everything works (some tinkering required to get touchpad right-click working, and I can't change backlight yet). Will add more info when I have time.
Edit: Everything does work just fine. I installed it on a MBR HDD (didn't want to deal with UEFI on my primary SSD, which doesn't have that much space anyways). Used the syslinux bootloader, installed it in the MBR of the HDD. BIOS was set to secureboot off, fastboot off, launch csm on - then I just hit ESC at startup and selected either my SSD for windows or HDD for Arch.
Out of the box, the glaring issues were:
1. 3d acceleration didn't work with nouveau (at least Cinnamon complained). I didn't bother with this (it may work with tinkering), as I installed the binary nvidia driver, which works fine. Note that KMS did work and booted fine to Cinnamon's fallback 2d mode, no crashes whatsoever.
2. Touchpad right-click button didn't work (though two-finger-tap worked as right-click).
http://superuser.com/questions/619582/right-elantech-touchpad-button-not-working-in-linux has the solution, it worked just fine in Arch, no reason why it wouldn't work in any other Linux. I did have to install the xf86-input-synaptics package though.
3. The brightness buttons don't work. To fix this, I appended
acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor
to my syslinux.cfg boot line, you can add the same to the relevant grub/grub2 files if using that. Then, make sure you
modprobe asus-nb-wmi
and make sure you auto-load it if needed. Once done, you can use
xbacklight -inc 10
to increase brightness by 10% (use -dec to decrease). I used the cinnamon custom hotkeys (any DE should have an equivalent) to set up ctrl+alt+up/down to up/down brightness by 10%.
I hope this helps. Note that Arch, being a rolling distribution, has the newest packages, so Ubuntu may be running older kernels/xserver versions that cause your issues.
