Battery life is good, not 12 hours, but I would say closer to 8 to 10 depending on usage. Charge time is a bit long since the battery has a lot of capacity.
Everything worked on Debian out of the box, I'm, using GNOME and did not have to configure nor setup anything extra. Sleep works fine and I have setup the power button to that behaviour. Sometimes when the battery is too low (say about 10%), then it won't wake up from sleep even tho that ought to be enough juice to keep the computer running for about an hour still, that might be a BIOS setting I haven't bothered to look into.
I left reddit about the time they introduced /r/popular and I recall the announcement mentioning that they would remove /r/all eventually. It's been a long time, but this was coming.