I recently got my hands on a brand new asus zenbook ux303 and it looks quite nice. So I did the first thing I wanted to do with it right away: Install Arch Linux. Yeah, I’ve been using Arch for quite a bit now on my desktop PC and I fell in love with it from the very first time I used it. No PPA nonsense, easy development and, to be honest, I’m quite used to its workflow.
Since the laptop came bundled with Windows, there was some work to do. I downloaded Arch Linux, made a bootable USB Flash Drive using rufus and started with the installation right away. The guide can be found on the arch wiki.
UEFI on Arch
The process is quite straightforward if you read carefully. I got kind
of stuck at this because, well, I like to do the process fast, but it
can’t always be like that. Do not forget to use gdisk for GPT
partitions.
Also, some little but useful pointers:
- The boot partition has to be EFI System Partition, which has code =EF00=.
- This partition also has to be set to
FAT32.
The rest is easy, just follow the guide. Nothing out of the ordinary. I’m sure people explain this better on youtube.
GNOME
I’ve been using GNOME for quite some time and I’m quite happy with it. There are some critical extensions that have to be installed to make it usable but that’s ok. I’ll write about it some other time.
Anyway, not everything works out of the box here, most of it is on the archwiki. I’ll explain what i went through.
WiFi
WiFi is quite a pain to configure without a GUI. You need sudo and it gets kind of annoying. Just install networkmanager, set it up (in GNOME gets as easy as just starting a service) and be done with it.
Bluetooth
Same thing here. Just follow the wiki, install the packages, enable the service. Done.
You might want to get this right in order to share Internet Connection with your cellphone. I have a Galaxy A5 2016 and it works flawlessly.
The rest
I had no problems with anything else. The rest of the stuff should work out of the box.
Hardware
This is the point where things get tricky. It took me quite a while to figure these issues out, and thats what made me want to do this post.
Keyboard.
I’m quite fond of the keyboard in this model though it could be nicer to have media keys. While the keyboard in this model has a lot of keys, I only find important to be able to control screen brightness, keyboard backlight and volume. I haven’t really tested anything else.
The Keyboard brightness and Volume keys worked right out of the box for me, as did the disable touchpad button. Unfortunately, i can’t say the same thing about the brightness keys, as they do not work out of the box. It’s not so bad though, because GNOME’s user panel can control the screen backlight, which provides an usable workaround.
I did a little research and it turned out my ACPI was working, it was just that the OS couldn’t handle the keys. Long story short, adding these options to my kernel made my backlight keys work:
acpi_osi=
acpi_backlight=none
With systemd-boot, you have to append the text to the =options=
line. In my case, it was the file
/boot/loader/entries/arch.conf. acpi_osi makes the keys work but
they don’t do anything, and acpi_backlight=none rebinds everything
to the backlight_intel interface.
GPU
GPU is probably the most tricky feature to set up in this model.
The archwiki has an article on how to set up Bumblebee in order to get the best of both worlds: Integrated graphics and dedicated video card. I must say I gave it endless tries to get it working and it -to some extent- does work. But only until i close the laptop. It then becomes unusable.
I still have problems with this, so i won’t be advising on this matter. I will say, though, that gaming on a 14 inch laptop is not really the best setup. I still have my desktop for that.
Battery discharging
I found out some months after I wrote this post, that nothing gets restored after the battery dies.
Honestly I don’t really want to test this feature, because bad things can happen: my battery can reduce its life or I might not get it to work on the first time. I can live with it, though, because the battery duration is quite good.
Conclusion
After months of using this laptop I have to say it is one of the smoothest computers I’ve ever used, it rarely freezes and it doesnt really overheat. Trying Linux on this laptop is definetly worth a try. I’ve been using it for around 9 months now and have barely had any problems