Alison, I've been pleasantly surprised here in Hong Kong that if I ask the store clerks, they will generously allow me to boot from my USB stick to see how well Linux runs, no complaints whatsoever.

And that's lucky too, because last spring and summer when I was shopping for a new machine, I tried like ten of them before I found one where screen, Wi-Fi and touchpad were working without glitches and the machine didn't crash after a few minutes.