I have an Asus as well, I'm on 13.04 and my card is a NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 635M with 2GB DDR3 VRAM. Bumblebee seems to work well with the latest nouveau drivers

I have an Asus as well, I'm on 13.04 and my card is a NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 635M with 2GB DDR3 VRAM. Bumblebee seems to work well with the latest nouveau drivers, I normally use the intel chipset for everything but playing Counter Strike. I spent a lot of time trying to fix this as well but nowadays it's pretty easy, for me it was just installing the xserver-xorg-video-nouveau driver from xorg-edgers then bumblebee and boom: optimus works. If I had to recommend a laptop, I'd recommend this one, an Asus K56CM: https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/K56CM/ https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/K56CM/ Probably like 3 or 4 months ago I would not recommend it, but these days optimus support is decent at least for a typical setup. PS: get an SSD for that computer and you'll have the ultimate linux dev. laptop right there.