I used to use an Acer breadboard when I was in college studying electronics. The “little bloatware” sure is appealing, but I think I’ll be putting Ubuntu on whatever I get, overwriting whatever’s there.
Why not dual boot it since you are getting one OS included and one for free...HDDs are so riduculously large now. Linux is nice but not fully complete when dealing with the rest of the world. Not sure what the Ubuntu load is now but shouldn’t impact your HDD storage concerns. Have you played with any solid state drives yet. Man, those things are fast.