I finally gave Linux a fair shot as my daily driver

[Mnky313]

Some Backstory

 

Over a month ago (I believe around Dec 1st) I was finally so fed up with Windows I forced myself to give Linux a proper try.

I've been slowly customizing my Windows experience for years, starting with basic stuff and eventually creating full custom images with custom scripts, tools, even a hacked together updater. The problem with all of these is that it's a constant uphill battle. Between Edge being so deeply rooted in the OS to the point that certain programs/games will not work without Edge & it's webview and the constantly changing of basic elements like the inexplicable removal of the user folders from the This PC menu I finally just got fed up.

Every Windows update feels like 1 step forward 3 steps back, that 1 step forward is what stopped me from just grabbing LTSC 2019 and calling it a day for another few years until Nvidia decides to stop letting their drivers work on 1809 (like they did with <1803).

Anyway onto the actual experiences, enough hating on windows.

 

The hardware

 

I use a very weird selection of hardware. My main system is a few year old watercooled desktop-replacement style laptop (Clevo X170SM-G) while my main portable system is a 2022 Z13 (the 'surface for gamers') which I disable the dGPU in and don't really use for gaming xD

I recently picked up a Zenbook Duo (basically the lowest spec one, 10510U, MX250) for cheap and have been using it more and more as my portable system because I really don't need the power of the Z13 all the time...

The Clevo

Because the Clevo is basically a desktop z490 system crammed into a laptop chassis it just works out of the box on Linux. The only real issue I had was I needed a way to control my radiator fan speed, this is handled by a micro-controller that sends a PWM signal based on the value passed to it over serial, fortunately this is a very similar process on Linux as it is with windows and after figuring out how to make a systemd service it works flawlessly, even better than windows which it tends to randomly stop working requiring me to open task scheduler and restart it.

The fingerprint sensor on the Clevo is not supported under Linux. But that's pretty much the only piece of hardware that I have that flat out doesn't work.

 

Having 3 monitors hooked up to a laptop only seems a little more buggy on Linux compared to windows, I do like how on Linux there is actually an option to align monitors by manually entering positions in the Nvidia X Server config panel as well as the ability to save display layouts. Compared to windows where I have to try and pixel perfect drag the preview around to make it mostly line up.

I used FancyZones for window management on Windows and switched to using gSnap which took some getting used to (mainly the fact you can't rebind it to shift and you have to use ctrl (+alt to span multiple zones) but the functionality is very similar to FancyZones for my use.

The Z13

Compared to the Clevo this is very much NOT a plug and play experience... Lets just get it out of the way, the fingerprint sensor is 'supported' but it functions as a swipe reader and is so inconsistent/slow it's basically useless. Suspend doesn't work. the SD reader is questionable (tbf it's also questionable on windows) and the XGm is it's own can of worms. But everything else just works on Debian/older linux kernels, the trackpad/keyboard have weird issues on anything 6.5+

 

The XGm is EXTREMELY finicky, I almost want to try the AMD based one and see if it's any better. There's a tool called supergfxctl by the asus-linux team that does allow it to work however it requires logging out and has a 50/50 chance of just not working from my experience, usually a reboot solves it but not always. Many hours have been wasted trying to change the hotplug mode, timeouts, etc to try and get it to work more reliably but nothing seems to help much.

Back to the suspend issue, I've tried a bunch of stuff but ended up just giving up and using Hibernate or just shutting down entirely. Suspend just causes the screen to stay off or sometimes turn on but stay at just a black screen. The window changing lighting modes from the blinking red sleep thing to the solid colour so it does know it's supposed to wake up but something is broken with it.

Now the biggest annoyance, the 10W power limit...
So from my testing on any newer BIOS (>310 I believe) the cpu is stuck at <10W because of something to do with Intel DPTF/DTT. This is a firmware bug that I've reported to ASUS but they have 0 interest in fixing it because 'if the drivers [Intel DPTF/DTT] are working there is no issue'. Even after I explained that it was caused by a BIOS update....
After literal days of testing stuff the fix is just simply use BIOS 310. That fixes the issue entirely.

Zenbook Duo

Funny enough the Zenbook Duo I bought on a whim because it was cheap seems to be the best supported device, the only things that don't seem to work are NVMe and the SD reader, NVMe drives randomly disconnect after waking from sleep or unplugging/plugging in the charger and the microSD reader randomly stops working.

Everything else works pretty much out of the box (you do need to install the asus-wmi-screenpad module to get brightness control for the second screen (which you want because by default it's quite dim) as well as a systemd service to set it to max brightness on boot). Suspend works fine, CPU turbos fine, touch between both screens does sometimes get confused for a sec when touching one screen, then jumping to the other but it's pretty quick to figure it out.

I have my eyes on another cheap broken Zenbook Duo but this one is an OLED model, if I can snag it for cheap I'll try it out. If not I'll probably pick up a 1TB SATA M.2 SSD for ~$50 to use this one.

I'm actually writing this on the Zenbook Duo \:P

 

Distros

I initially installed Debian 12 on both my Clevo and Z13 (this is before I got the Zenbook) and was honestly not that impressed with the preinstalled 'bloatware'. Even without the system utilities I still had to remove probably 3 dozen or so packages (why does gnome come with SO MANY preinstalled games...) but at least it was as easy as just uninstalling them from the Software menu I would like to not have to put in my password EVERY SINGLE TIME I uninstall one though (yes, I know you can remove them through the terminal, I did that later on). Also not impressed that parental controls and help can't be removed from the menu, requiring you to use the command line, it feels very windows like IMO.

I did try out Arch (mainly to try and see if it helped with the issues on the Z13) and I very much see why it's for advanced users. Archinstall makes it quite easy to get setup honestly, just customize everything through the prompts and run a few commands to get a desktop environment installed and you're good*

*except you aren't

I never did resolve this weird fullscreen issue and a lot of characters were missing, basically anything not ASCII. Didn't really try to resolve the characters as it was low on the priority list compared to the fullscreen issue.
I'm positive that with some tinkering and more knowledge someone could fix these issues but I ended up just jumping ship back to Debian.
 

Desktop Environments

I chose GNOME because of it's design and extension support, I am really not a fan of KDE Plasma's design. I'm sure it would be possible to theme it enough that I wouldn't mind it but I didn't bother.

Basic theming on Linux is quite the endeavor (at least on GNOME). Something as simple as changing the accent colour of the Apps/UI requires modifying SVGs, finding and replacing half a dozen values in a CSS file, creating 2 other css override files and placing the theme is 3 separate places as well as running multiple terminal commands just to make sure it applies to native GTK3/4 + flatpak GTK3/4 apps as well as the shell. I did figure it out but it's a lot more complex than I was expecting.

To be clear, I had to do a VERY similar thing on windows, requiring modification of the proprietary msstyles file and all the images within for the global dark theme as well as having services running that constantly applied the accent to other elements.

I use quite a few GNOME extensions as well, some standouts are:

• App Hider (to hide a lot of the apps I keep installed but don't launch ever like Characters and Fonts)
• Notification Filter (to add a filter of .* regex, I HATE desktop notifications, killed the service on windows and disabling them in GNOME doesn't block the stupid 'x is ready' or screenshot notifications....)
• App Icons Taskbar (Basically moves the dock to the bar at the top all the time, I am not a fan of the amount of screen taken up by both the top bar and bottom dock nor do I like auto-hiding it so this is a perfect solution for me.)

 

Software

 

Most of the apps I used on windows are available on Linux as well:

• Librewolf (Firefox fork) - Native Linux version
• Vesktop (Vencord (Modified Discord) Desktop Client) - Native Linux version
• Freetube - Native Linux version
• KeepassXC - Native Linux version

For the stuff that doesn't have a native Linux version:

• Winamp - Switched to Amberol which is FINALLY a basic music player that just works and actually looks good \:D
• RDP client - Using Remmina currently but looking for something less cluttered/complicated. GNOME's app has terrible colours which is a problem because I work through RDP
• VSCode - Honestly, I didn't even install the native linux version. GNOME's built in text editor + nano is good enough to not need it.
• Synctrayzor (Syncthing GUI) - Switched to Syncthing-GTK, pretty much the same functionality.
• Soulseek - Nicotine+ works well, I rarely use it. Just if I can't find the flac for a song via other means.
• Paint.net - I've been using GIMP but there's quite the learning curve, if anyone knows alternatives feel free to suggest them
• Video Trimming - I used the built in Photos app for this on Windows but I found this app on the GNOME Software store which is just a basic video trimmer and works great.

I don't really use much software, some stuff I didn't mention because it's either such a basic app that GNOME has a version of it or it's popular enough that I didn't feel like it needed to be mentioned (i.e. Steam)

Q & A

Q: Why only Debian and Arch, why not Manjaro or Pop!_OS or even Ubuntu?
A: Manjaro wasn't recommended by the asus-linux team and the main reason I tried Arch was because of their recommendation for the Z13. Plus I don't like pacman, the syntax is extremely convoluted. I use Ubuntu server and was already used to/like apt. Plus a lot of the software mentioned above is distributed as .deb files which makes it easier.

As for Pop!_OS and Ubuntu, I don't really have a good reason. I tried Pop!_OS and used it for a short while but didn't really like they're spin on GNOME (and I think I had other issues but I don't remember) and for Ubuntu I didn't want to deal with native, flatpak, and snap. Plus again, I didn't really like their spin on GNOME either.

Q: If you have so many issues with the Z13 on Linux why not just go back to windows on the Z13 and use Linux on everything else?
A: I can't stand the idea of mixing Linux + windows on my daily systems, having to deal with that sounds like a headache trying to manage different software for each OS, hell I don't even want to run different distros on my systems because of having to remember which package manager/format to get on each machine...

Q: Are you going back to windows?
A: Hell no, I'm done with windows. It's to the point now where I'm happy with the experience and I have no real reason to switch back. I still use windows on a handful of machines (I have a tablet PC just for discord calls which runs a super stripped down version of windows, same with a PC that I use for playing YouTube videos via Freetube on my 'TV' (it's my old Acer Predator 43" monitor that got repurposed), both of these will probably run linux at some point when I get bored. I also have an old Precision M6700 running windows 7 (mainly for phone tinkering, all it really needs to do is run Odin/Some ancient leaked Qualcomm tools) as well as a VM on my main server for hosting game servers/discord bots/etc. that probably won't change too soon (I have a separate Linux VM which hosts the docker containers for most services). At some point I want to move that VM to Linux and merge it with the docker host but rn that's too much work.

At work I still use windows as well as the VM I remote into runs windows because it needs to run the Microsoft Remote Desktop client to connect to our cloud PCs for work. This likely won't change.
 

[goatedpenguin]

Glad to know your using linux, one thing I will point out is that using a multi monitor in linux especially with the X server can be very buggy. I would have recommend you to use wayland since it is way more smoother and is more robust but since you have an nvidia gpu... Wayland would probably not be the best. In terms of a gpu I would lean more to team AMD since their compatibility with linux especially in drivers is way better than nvidia's.

 

On the topic for desktop environments, gnome in general is known to have quite a bit of bloatware that can be removed however I would highly recommend trying out xfce. It may look ugly at first but its meant to be a blank canvas where you can tune it to your own liking, And also remember that you can have multiple desktop environments on one system just make sure to do a bit of research to make sure that nothing would clash but in general you can.

 

When using a bleeding edge distro like arch or fedora the rule of thumb is to never ever do partial updates and you do not need to update your system everyday. I would also say that when using an arch based distro you should expect it to break once in a while which is completely normal(this is one of the main reasons I would recommend a debian based distro for newcomers).

[Mnky313]

11 hours ago, goatedpenguin said:

Glad to know your using linux, one thing I will point out is that using a multi monitor in linux especially with the X server can be very buggy. I would have recommend you to use wayland since it is way more smoother and is more robust but since you have an nvidia gpu... Wayland would probably not be the best. In terms of a gpu I would lean more to team AMD since their compatibility with linux especially in drivers is way better than nvidia's.

I can't get wayland to work reliably on my Clevo system, on the Z13 and Zenbook Duo it works fine though. I also tried connecting the Z13 to 2 monitors and ran into awful lag/stutters even on wayland. Even just dragging a window around felt like you were constantly changing the refresh rate from 144 to 60 or even 30 and back. I suspect the 4k 144hz monitor has something to do with it, though the other 2 displays were 120hz so it's not just grabbing the lowest refresh rate and causing problems. (though this was on Arch so maybe I'll give it another shot with debian and see.)

I'm fully aware that AMD is a better option but because all of my systems are laptops (and weird ones at that) there's not many AMD options... If I were to go out and buy a machine to replace my current ones it would probably be all AMD for a number of reasons.

 

11 hours ago, goatedpenguin said:

On the topic for desktop environments, gnome in general is known to have quite a bit of bloatware that can be removed however I would highly recommend trying out xfce. It may look ugly at first but its meant to be a blank canvas where you can tune it to your own liking, And also remember that you can have multiple desktop environments on one system just make sure to do a bit of research to make sure that nothing would clash but in general you can.

I completely forgot about the ability to have multiple desktop environments on one system.
I might give XFCE a shot but honestly once I removed all the extra crap GNOME seems to be pretty responsive and I like a lot of the extensions features.
 

11 hours ago, goatedpenguin said:

When using a bleeding edge distro like arch or fedora the rule of thumb is to never ever do partial updates and you do not need to update your system everyday. I would also say that when using an arch based distro you should expect it to break once in a while which is completely normal(this is one of the main reasons I would recommend a debian based distro for newcomers).

Makes sense, I'm no stranger to having to reinstall operating systems ever few months, I think the longest lasting windows Install I had was probably 6 months... Something always breaks and it's just easier to reinstall than try and track down and fix the issues.
I tend to update quite frequently so it makes sense that I would run into weird issues.

[goatedpenguin]

Problem with reinstslling a distro when it breaks is that you never learn anything about how to fix a broken system or gain any important knowledge. Make sure that you are comfortable with having a broken system and be prepared to ask a lot of questions online, we all start learning from somewhere or someone. 

[Biohazard777]

17 hours ago, Mnky313 said:

Paint.net - I've been using GIMP but there's quite the learning curve, if anyone knows alternatives feel free to suggest them

Krita (feature rich)
KolourPaint (dead simple)

[goatedpenguin]

If you are doing editing, I believe that you can run adobe photoshop on linux but not natively so the performance might not be as good as running it on windows, though I do suggest you give it a try.

[goatedpenguin]

ignore what I posted sorry(not the above one)

[Mnky313]

Update

I got another Zenbook Duo (this time a Pro Duo 14 OLED) for a good deal and switched over to it.
It's a very better experience than the other Zenbook Duo in Linux with 1 big annoying issue.

They are much higher res panels (2880x1800 + 2880x864) which means I have to use scaling and as I expected it's awful, I hate scaling. In order to make the display usable I have to use fractional scaling, 200% is way too much and 100% is quite small...

<rant>
What is the obsession with putting displays in laptops that are so high res you basically need to use scaling to make it a usable experience?? I thought we all agreed scaling is awful not to mention that the main benefit of a higher res display (the extra screen real estate) DOESN'T EXIST IF YOU SCALE IT. It's basically just needless battery drain (and performance loss in games unless you lower the resolution which looks worse because it's non-native res).

I complained about it when they put a 1600p panel in the new Z13 and I'm going to complain about it in this 14" zenbook duo too, it's dumb. maybe on a 17" laptop I could understand a 1440p class display but for a 13-14" screen there is absolutely no reason to go above 1080p/1200p.

</rant>

Wayland isn't an option because from everything I can find there is still no way to remap touch input for multi-monitor setups which means I'm stuck with X11. However with X11 getting fractional scaling working is very broken, I have to run a script to set scaling and monitor position every time the displays wakes from sleep...

 

Other than the resolution the display is awesome, OLED on a laptop looks so good. I wouldn't use it for my main machine because I'd be worried about burn in but for a secondary machine I'm hoping it'll be fine. (it does freak me out when I think the display turns off but it's actually just black though.. Also the secondary display isn't OLED? I thought it was for some reason but no, checking the specs on Asus' site doesn't mention anything about them both being OLED)

I'm sure there's a way to automate this and I'll keep poking around but it's pretty annoying.

Though that's pretty much the only thing that doesn't work properly. Keyboard backlighting works perfectly, suspend (with NVMe) works perfectly, (once I remap inputs) touch on both screens works perfectly, even the microSD reader works perfectly (which didn't work very well on either the Z13 or old Zenbook Duo)