Here are some notes for anyone attempting to install Xubuntu 16.04 on a Sager NP8952 laptop (Clevo P950HR). Most things work well enough. The initial installation onto the primary SSD along side Windows 10 was uneventful, from a live USB created with unetbootin.
System components:
CPU: Intel Kaby Lake i7-7700HQ
GPU: GTX 1070 (8GB) MAX-Q, with Optimus
Primary drive: WD M.2 SSD, with Windows 10 preinstalled
Wireless: Intel AC8265
Audio: Intel HD + Sound BlasterX
Here is the status so far:
Bluetooth – works.
Camera – untested.

Dave’s conky display, Xubuntu, Sager NP8952 laptop
Card reader – untested
CPU frequency scaling – seems to work with Intel p-state driver after some fiddling. There were times when the driver unnecessarily kept the CPU frequency at maximum, so I tried a variety of fixes including installing and configuring laptop-mode-tools, xfce4-indicator-plugin, cpufrequtils, and perhaps others. Not using cpufreqd, nor tlp. cpufrequtils is currently disabled in /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils. Frequency scaling seems to be working now and I’m no longer sure which tweaks were necessary.
External monitor – works with HDMI.
Fingerprint reader – untested.
Keyboard backlight – permanently on, steady blue, no way to control it.
Keyboard hotkeys – some work: screen brightness, volume, suspend, external monitor, and others.
Nvidia proprietary driver – works (384.90).
Shutdown – (1) use “systemctl edit cups-browsed.service” to reduce the CUPS timeout to a few seconds as described in https://askubuntu.com/questions/760952/slow-shutdown-on-ubuntu-16-04-lts-stopping-thermal-daemon-running-fit-make-remo; (2) add acpi=force to linux command line to allow shutdown to finish.
Sleep/restore – the headphone jack is inoperative after suspend/restore.
Sound – (1) the speakers were muted at first: use alsamixer to unmute the speakers; only need to do this once; (2) the headphone jack is inoperative after suspend/restore.
Touchpad – works.
Wifi – works
You can get a copy of my conkyrc file here. Just rename it to .conkyrc.