I need to buy a new Laptop for my parents in law.

I am considering to buy the Acer Aspire 3 (A315-51-37QQ)

Does anyone here have any good (or bad) experience installing Linux on this device?

I didn't have this laptop, but I had a very SIMILAR laptop from HP, and everything worked 100% out of the box in Arch, Fedora, and Debian Testing (now stable) at the time. Probably how easy it will be to get working will depend on what it uses for wireless. My HP used Intel wireless (despite being an AMD processor & IGP), which is near flawless compatibility with linux, but I'm not sure what chipset this uses.

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Thanks for the input Timothy. I have searched a littlebit and I could not find the exact wifi chipset so far.
At this point what concerns me more is a comment on the web store's product page that states that Ubuntu 16 wasn't installable and that the reason was specific to Acer UEFI Laptops where the configuration changes could not be written to the NVRAM.
For some reason the commenter decided to deactivate the SSD in UEFI and that bricked the laptop.
On the one hand this scares me a littlebit, on the other hand the comment did not sound as if the writer was very experienced with Linux. I think I'd be willing to take the bet, but I'd be more comfortable if anyone here had any experience with that exact model...

The windows wireless driver that's available on the acer website is named "intel_19.60.0" ... I am not expecting any issues here...

Laptop arrived today. Installation went flawlessly. The wireless chip is from atheros and the debian package firmware-atheros seems to work fine.

Everything else seems to work out of the box so far.

That's AWESOME!!

Did you set it up to dual boot with Windows or pure Linux?

Pure Linux. When I asked my mother in law she said "what would I need Windows for?"

That is an absolutely WONDERFUL reply!!

Yep, I know I am spoiled. :-)

May I ask which distribution you managed to install? I tried to install (countless tries) Ubuntu 16 and Debian 9 on my Acer Aspire 3 (A315-31-P1RK) but all of my attempts failed when it comes to installing grub... Ubuntu just hangs up when the installer tries to install grub and Debian gives me errors on installing grub (installing grub dummy failed), too... Windows 10 installs flawlessly... I'm going mad...

I installed Debian 9. Note that I disabled secure boot in the firmware interface (which you can open by pressing F2 at boot time).
In order to be able to disable secureboot you have to set a supervisor password first. I set it to something very simple and cleared it right after disabling secureboot.
You can clear the password by setting an empty password. Make sure it says "Clear" after clearing it.

i tried like everything and anything... even with secureboot disabled (when secureboot is enabled ubuntu stops when installing a signed generic package)... seems like jinxed... it always fails/stops/hangs when it comes to installing grub... acer had problems with bios and linux installations earlier - maybe a bios update will fix it... thx anyways!

That's really weird. Another family member purchased this device in the meanwhile (by pure coincidence, isn't that weird!) and I threw Debian on it just the day before yesterday - no problems!

You are using efi-grub right? Don't try to install grub to the mbr (master boot record), make sure that in the partitioning screen during install the first partition is used as efi system partition...

yes, i'm using efi-grub and i've also failed to install it in the first partition... may i ask you for the version number of your uefi/bios? mine is 1.02 as far as i can remember...

i really can't recommend the Acer Aspire 3 A315-31-P1RK for linux users...

I'll check the EFI version tonight and let you know...