hiya mike thanks for the comprehensive insights.
still investigating the aorus forums, there does exist a thread where people are attempting to install various flavours of linux, and are struggling quite a lot, basically. one person is running lubuntu in a VM under windows and the machine is hanging (not the same hardware as i want to get: older and the 15in version), another person is compiling the nvidia drivers and they're getting kernel panics (indicative of hardware memory errors).
however, there is another person here http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=5388556 who seems to have got slackware dual-booted and is actually happy.
*sigh* argh i can just feel that, after thinking it through, 16GB simply isn't going to be enough, long-term.
l.