Acer laptops have been fairly Linux-friendly for me, though my current Aspire V3 is hardly a gaming laptop. But the general rule of thumb is to get a laptop with a single GPU. Many laptops these days have hybrid graphics using integrated chips and a more powerful discrete GPU, with the idea that during normal usage (browsing, writing documents, etc) only the integrated chip is used and during gaming the discrete GPU activates and the graphics processing is pushed onto it. Sadly this doesn't work quite as nicely on Linux and you might have to do some tweaking to get that working properly.

So, if you can, get a laptop with just a discrete Nvidia GPU, preferrably not the latest generation. Intels are also okay but you won't be doing much 3D gaming on them, as they are pretty weak.

Now I'm not sure about these special laptop features, such as glowing keyboards. All of my keyboards are boring non-glowing ones so I can't really comment on that. I imagine there is some level of support for those though.

Where are you located in the world? Would help in giving you options.

Tanks for the answers.
First, I live in France and usually buy my hardware components at www.ldlc.com or www.materiel.net.

The glowing keyboard is not the main concern actually ;)
What you say about those hybrid graphics worries me a lot because I was interested in laptops from the GS70 and GT72 series by MSI. I like the GT72 because there is room for extra memory and SSD. Unfortunately, the GT72 use this hybrid graphics technology...

You will be hard pressed to find a laptop with nvidia that isn't a hybrid.

I am testing out a laptop from http://www.entroware.com at the moment, and they are great (review will be up soon).

I was surprised by my Alienware 14 laptop. DIdn't think it would be as frendly as it is for linux and for linux gaming.

Of course it requires a bit of tweaks as for the bumblebee and primus driver to support the Optimus Nvidia technology, but once it's done, it works great!

Nvidia optimus works fine these days with the Bumblebee primus bridge. In steam you can just add a launch prefix and the games you want will start on the nvidia GPU.

I had good experience with Asus laptops for Linux gaming, but I can't speak for the current generation. My early 2012 asus laptop with Intel + nvidia works great with Ubuntu.

My experience with Acer is that the build quality is very low, but again slightly outdated experience with them on my side.

Your post confirms my choice : I will probably get an Asus G751JY, I'm just waiting for a good deal. I've found a nice blog that will probably be helpful : https://g751jy.wordpress.com/ .

Well, personally I don't see the point in quasi desktop 17" laptops and would rather build myself a steamos box and buy a small Intel only laptop for the same price, but that's your choice.
Make sure you get a recent distribution (wait of Ubuntu 15.04 or anything based on that like the upcoming kubintu or Linux mint releases) as the GPU is only supported by very recent nvidia drivers and these can be a bit of a hassle to install on older distribution like the last Ubuntu LTS release or Debian.

Personally, from my experience with laptops (which goes back a long way and is a very, very unhappy one), I would suggest that it is much better value for money getting a cheap low-end laptop (mid-range if you intend to do more than simple tasks) and then a decent gaming desktop.

For the £1500 you spend on a laptop, you could get an amazing gaming rig for £1000 with much, much better performance than the laptop, and then also get a very solid laptop for £500. I still think the price-to-performance ratio isn't there yet for gaming laptops and won't be for a long time.

Just to give an example, I spent £400 on a laptop about 2 years ago (which broke a couple of months ago and is irreparable since the GPU is soldered to the CPU) and a year later spent £400 on a decent gaming PC which has easily 3x the gaming performance. I really regret not having spent £200 on the laptop (which I'd just use for browsing and work uni stuff) and spent the £200 I'd saved getting a more powerful GPU like the GTX 970.

I know that's not the kind of advice you're expecting and that it's probably pretty useless to you, but just giving my opinion nonetheless. If you're still going with the laptop though, I can recommend [Novatech](http://www.novatech.co.uk/laptop/gaming/) - they have a pretty good range of gaming laptops and they all come without Windows so you can save yourself a bit of money there. The people I know who bought from them have had good experiences and they have good customer service.

Don't worry, reading one's advice is always interesting. Actually I already own a really decent desktop gaming computer, and never bought a gaming laptop before. But for professionnal reasons, I will spend most of my time away from home, and as a consequence away from my gaming desktop which is also the family's computer, during the next 2 years. So I'm looking for something that can be easily moved from one place to another. Moreover, if I buy a new desktop computer instead if a laptop, I will need an extra keyboard, screen and audio device, which will significantly increase the price.
I know it's an expensive choice, but in this specific situation it's not that crazy.

However I still have a few months before I buy it, so I'm still interested in any kind of advice. I will have a look at Novatech products, customer service quality is essential to me.

Julius > good to know that.

You can get a decent mid range speed gaming laptop at a reasonably portable size and weight (<15"), for a bit less than 1000$ though. Sure it will not run everything in ultra settings, but given the games that are typically ported to Linux you will be fine in 95% of the cases.

I am in a similar boat as you working abroad a lot and my 14" gaming laptop is already a hassle to move around with. 17" is a desktop replacement I woul not consider portable and battery running times are usually bad too.

Edit: sorry double post.

I got an ultra portable LED projector that is cool for gaming though (not the reason I bought it but it works).