Here is another success story from Reddit I saw today. It’s nice to see some positive feedback and not just complaints.
The state of Linux on 2024 G16 : r/Ubuntu
The state of Linux on 2024 G16
I use to use Ubuntu back in the early 2000s and something gave me the itch to give it a shot. I had a spare SSD I installed Ubuntu 26.04 on just to test it out and booted through an external drive. I only picked Ubuntu because its what I am use to but I understand there are probably better distros for this laptop in particular. I wasn’t expecting much as from my memory using Ubuntu back in the day we were lucky to get the OS to boot on a laptop much less having all the bells and whistles functioning. I had no idea how far it had come. I installed on my external drive and I was pretty shocked to see almost everything worked out of the box. Almost everything. Wifi, bluetooth, camera all worked right away.
Right out of the box the only thing that wasn’t just working was the brightness control, the RGB/fan and all the other asus stuff and the speakers were also very messed up with cracking and no bass. To my shock all the display drivers installed without issue.
Using Gemini it took about 5 minutes to fix the brightness control with a tiny grub modification. All the RGB and fan stuff was a super easy fix by installing the Asus control software. Finally with more help from Gemini I was able to fix the speaker sound with Easy Effects and just loading Advanced Auto Gain preset. Ive listened to music going back and forth between windows and Ubuntu and I honestly can barely tell a difference. Maybe a little bassier in ubuntu with that preset.
Here are some things that gave me a lot of trouble and took a while to fix. There is no equivalent to G-Helper that I am aware of so cleanly switching graphics is tough. You have to use this app supergfxctl which is buggy as all hell and crashes sometimes. I dont use my Nvidia GPU on linux so I had to spend a few days figuring out how to just totally set it up to only use the intel gpu. It kept switching to hybrid mode randomly which would kill battery life. Eventually I figured it out but it took a while.
Battery life was another thing that took a while to figure out. On windows in eco mode I was drawing between 8-10 watts and I could get pretty great battery life just doing very light tasks like answering emails and web browsing. On Ubuntu out of the box because of the GPU switching issue it would stay around 16-24 watts of discharge. I spent days messing around with different tools including TLP and others trying to squeeze out better battery life but I finally in the end it seems like the built in Ubuntu Power modes work pretty well. Once I figured out how to totally turn off the Nvidia GPU and just using Ubuntu in power saver with Asus control center in quiet mode with fans off and no keyboard lighting I am back down to drawing 8-10 watts doing light task. That is AFTER adding that disk internally to my 2nd M.2 slot. Externally it was using a little more power. I do feel like windows still has a slight edge on battery discharge as it stays lower more consistently but it could also just be the monitoring software. I could probably squeeze out another watt of power saving if I have both windows and ubuntu on the same drive but haven’t gotten there yet. Windows seems to be a bit more aggressive with putting hardware in a sleep state which may be why it edges out a bit better. Im sure there is a way to tinker with linux to match windows exactly but its so good right now I wont mess with it.
Sleep worked amazing out of the box. Shockingly even better than windows. Its up and running in a fraction of a second as soon as I lift that lid. I remember this never working in the past. I remember total black screens and lock ups. Maybe its the new kernel but I have seen others say sleep doesnt work but it just worked flawlessly for me. Ive tested sleep back to back like 20 times opening and closing the lid and it hasnt locked up once in the last 2 weeks. It never turned on in my bookbag or anything. Using sleep it draws less than 1w an hour. I left it sleeping 12 hours and it used about 10%. Its not a macbook or anything but it is ok. On windows if it sleeps too long it will go into hibernate to save even more battery. This doesnt work by default and has to be set up. That took some playing around with and didnt work the first few times I tried it. Turns out the 8gb swap by default is too small. Again with Geminis help I fixed that pretty quickly. I havent had any issues with that yet although its only been a few days since I got that working. Honestly ubuntu boots so insanely quickly I dont really think you need hibernate. Im just the type I like to close my lid and throw my laptop in my bag and forget about it. I may let it sit a while and I want to make sure I have decent battery even if I leave it for 2 days. If you dont do that dont mess with it.
I dont play games on linux so I cant comment on that. At least not for now.
Not really sure the point of this post but I guess I am just so surprised how good linux has gotten. To be honest I think it was easier to set up than a fresh windows install with all the drivers and messing with it.