I have not been a Windows user at home since the first Intel Macs came out and I am thinking of moving to Linux and putting either Fedora or Ubuntu on a laptop as a clean install.
However, I am hearing horror stories of those who have attempted the same thing with laptops with Windows 8.1 installed on it (something to do with the Bios).
What would you recommend in purchasing a Laptop for installing Linux on.
I am also thinking of doing a Desktop/Server probably using CentOS but I will be building that from scratch (something I have not done in decades) so I will not have the Windows issues (hopefully)
I would suggest to create a separate partition on your windows machine and install linux on that partition to be on safer side(chose linux boot when you get windows boot list). You can try it out for couple of days, if everything works out then i guess you should be able to erase windows completely and do a fresh install of linux or just allocate the space to your linux.
The new kind of BIOS is indeed a problem. You will need to do some wrangling to get any kind of installation media to boot at all.
I too have heard horror stories of laptops which simply will not boot anything but their hard drive, but I haven't actually found anything that bad yet. I've always been able to make them boot one way or another.
Ubuntu may be the easiest to start with. Their CD's may actually be recognized as 'valid' media even without having to drag "secure boot" away kicking and screaming, and its installer knows how to deal with modern machines.
I had a bear of a time getting my Lenovo laptop just to present a standard BIOS prompt. It's not hard to do, it's just weird, obscure, and seemingly deliberately hard to find. IIRC I had to do something like shut down the existing Windows install while holding the left CTRL key down.
Once I got the standard BIO prompt, I was able to boot it off a CD.
If its a clean install you dont need to worry to much about the last OS installed , be sure to format the disk. As your using Linux an older laptop would be perfect as it does not need the same hardware as a windows install