Recently I switched from Fedora 18 to Ubuntu 13.10 on my personal Acer Aspire V5 laptop (a wrong decision when I bought it - anyways...). There are two annoying issues when using both Fedora and Ubuntu on this laptop

Skype Dark Video Screen issue

Skype works on both Fedora and Ubuntu, however, there is this darn issue of dark video screen. This can be fixed by using guvcview and/or from command line tool uvcdynctrl as discussed by this guy in detail.

To ease up calling uvcdynctrl, you can create a launcher and add it to the dash. Follow this link to create desktop launcher in Ubuntu.

Fn keys Screen Brightness issue

The second issue is that screen brightness doesn't work, neither Fn Brightness (blue Fn - left right keys) nor from System Settings ... Brightness & Lock.

To fix the issue for System Settings, we need to add acpi_backlight=vendor to kernel command line parameter as part of grub config. For Fedora follow similar approach for grub2, following approach works in Ubuntu. Update GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in /etc/default/grub then run update-grub and restart.

To make the Fn key work again, try fixing /etc/acpi/asus-keyboard-backlight.sh and update KEYS_DIR to KEYS_DIR=/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight. This will allow Fn scripts to call the correct scripts instead of default values (which doesn't work anymore after using acpi_backlight=vendor). Restart to test it.

P.S. Ubuntu seems to have become more user friendly than Fedora (shh...don't tell my former colleagues back at Red Hat ;-))