Edit: Figured out a way to run the 3.8.x series kernel here. I am running 3.8.0-31 at the moment, without any issues. This, though, is not recommended by the eOS team and should something go wrong, you will be on your own.
One of the best post-installation resources on elemetaryOS is the elementaryupdate.com site. They conclude their post on what more you can do to customize and update the OS after installing the current version (Luna), with a recommendation to upgrade the kernel to raring-lts. If you do this on the Acer Aspie V5-431, you will break your Broadcom BCM43228 (14e4:4359) driver as the bcmwl-kernel-source module will not build on the 3.8.0-29-generic kernel and many hours of frustration will follow.
In short, stick to the 3.2.x.x series kernels till the eOS team will suggest otherwise, as they do recommend sticking to the 3.2.x.x series in this post. There are good reasons to move to the latest kernel as a lot of things seem to work better — auto-dimming of the display for one — with the new kernel, but this kind of breakage is severe and it will be a good idea to stay away from any kernel upgrades that don’t get pushed through the software update process.
This is really one of the annoying things about using Linux on the desktop as you would expect something that worked out-of-the-box in an older version of the kernel to do the same in a much newer version. I fully understand the reasons why things work this way, but it is extremely poor user experience and even for someone like me, who is a bit better than the average user in figuring out these things, it is frustrating and a waste of time.
Do Not Upgrade Kernel While Using elemetaryOS On Acer Aspire V5-431
