I doubt there is any crapware or really, and significant software difference in the Dell version beyond a desktop link. It seems extremely unlikely to me that t

I doubt there is any crapware or really, and significant software difference in the Dell version beyond a desktop link. It seems extremely unlikely to me that they're doing much in terms of software customization. I'm sure you could get the laptop to dual-boot -- what are they going to do, modify GRUB2? --, but you'd need somewhere to install the other OS. What they could do and which would be bad is use some sort of component which requires a non-free driver that's not supported well/anymore (so you're stuck with Ubuntu 12.x) or non-redistributable (ie. only available as part of Dell's iso). Let's say they ship a 100% proprietary and non-redistributable driver for NVIDIA's Optimus. But that seems very unlikely (if somewhat hilarous). And other than that I can't imagine any reason why you'd have any issue installing any other Linux distribution.