For anyone interested in using this laptop for linux, I've now had mine for a couple of weeks and taken it on its first trip, and so can now give some detailed feedback. For context, I am a software engineer and work primarily in linux, only using windows for games that don't have a linux port.
My preferred distro is fedora, as such some of the things I mention may be fedora specific, but most things should apply to any distro that runs recent kernels.
Out of the box, pretty much everything works perfectly on fedora. There was a slight hiccup with my first update, as it caused nouveau (the open source nvidia drivers) to hang the system on boot. This could be easily resolved by disabling nouveau (this can be done by adding 'rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau' to the kernel command line). Performance is excellent, as you'd expect. Even gaming works great once you install nvidia drivers and steam. Battery life was OK, but nothing amazing out of the box - probably looking at 4 hours or so assuming a light task.
As usual with linux, it was pretty easy to tweak a few settings to significantly improve battery life. The easiest by far is to install powertop and then run its autotune - this can be done via a root terminal on fedora by running:
dnf install powertop
powertop --auto-tune
You can make this apply on boot automatically by running this as root:
systemctl enable powertop
Powertop will enable various power saving features, which also has the effect of allowing the cpu package to drop all the way to pc7 - this makes a big difference to idle power comsumption, and results in a battery life pretty much equivalent to the best you can get in windows - 7-10 hours.
I didn't stop here however - with some more complex tweaking then you can get even more idle power reduction. I won't give step by steps here, but will describe what I did. First of all, you want to enable the power saving features that powertop's autotune cannot do - these are best set via kernel command line parameters. The ones I ended up with were:
rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau pcie_aspm.policy=powersupersave i915.enable_guc=1 i915.enable_fbc=1 iwlwifi.power_save=1 iwlwifi.d0i3_disable=0 iwlwifi.uapsd_disable=0
This allowed cpu package power consumption to drop to less than a watt! The final thing left wasting power was the nvidia GPU. While it drops to a low power mode via standard PCIE power management, it still eats a few watts. To fully shut it down, you need to install bbswitch (part of bumblebee). Note that I don't recommend trying to make a full bumblebee setup work (I tried but hit lots of snags with hanging and other issues), but instead simply manually switch between intel and nvidia graphics.
Once I did all this, my idle power consumption when running on the intel graphics card with minimum backlight brighness was an amazing 4.5 watts! At idle, I was getting a battery life of 20+ hours! (realistically the actual battery life is less unless you just want to watch an idle screen for 20 hours) This is by far the lowest idle power consumption I've ever seen out of a performance laptop.
Although it took a bit of tweaking, I am very pleased with what this laptop can do - its performance is excellent, but can also manage a great battery life if you're doing light tasks - I can pretty easily get 12 hours or so battery life out of the laptop.
...... let's make this place greater!