I recently purchased a ASUS UX31E to run Fedora Linux (F16). (Although I had a very happy 3.5 years with my Lenovo X200s, I wanted to try out the new ultrabooks.)
Pros:
- Good laptop.
- Model UX31E-72 has a reasonable size flash disk (256GB).
- Bigger (wider) screen (1600x900 pixels).
- Thin is nice.
- Good Linux support (as of March 2012).
Cons:
- Limited memory: only 4GiB, so it’s unbalanced with thin RAM vs. the fat CPU. (For example, a 4-way parallel kernel compile swaps, but nothing should swap in this day and age.)
- Touchpad support somewhat incomplete. (Syncontrol is good, but settings are reset on suspend resume and not all settings are in System Settings > Mouse and Touchpad.)
- Suspend/resume needs some tweaks (important!).
- External monitor on VGA port doesn’t sleep.
- Internal monitor runs only at 1600x900; mirroring an external display doesn’t work.
- Currently Bluetooth doens’t pair with my external keyboard (patch available, details below, and fixed in current Linux as of May 2012).
- Audio port problems, described below with work-around.
- USB ethernet is only adequate. (I get big lag and USB keyboard failure moving large files on a fast LAN when presumably the USB bus gets saturated.)
Reflecting on things after several months of use.
- I really like the form factor. Bigger but thin is not bad.
- The lack of memory is deadly. Swapping can grind the machine to a halt, and that’s dumb in 2012.
So I would not buy another of this model. And, near as I can tell, all Ultrabooks currently have 4GiB of RAM. So we’ll have to wait for the next generation. Sigh.
And after eight months of use: I moved to a Lenovo X1 Carbon. I found the keyboard on the ASUS really hard to type on, and the SSD would “thrash”, basically locking up the system for up to 5 minutes in I/O intensive tasks. The disk problem was exasperated by the relatively small RAM requiring the system to swap. Hopefully the Carbon will address these problems.
Linux
Bluetooth
For the most part, It Just Works With Linux, as of March 2012 and Linux kernel 3.3. for this device as driver support crept in However, it currently needs suspend/resume tweak, and bluetooth needs a kernel patch (patch is in Ubuntu around April 2012; and in Fedora as of kernel 3-3.2-1 by end of April 2012, see Fedora bugzilla #808650 and #811087).
Pointers for interested users:
- the Ubuntu Asus page: very complete
- the Ubuntu discussion thread about 300 messages as of March 2012–have fun :-)
- a Fedora discussion thread, 5 messages but says it mostly works.
- for Fedora 16, make sure you get current updates (kernel-3.3, etc.), since many of the drivers are post-Fedora 16 release.
Audio Port Problem
In April I noticed small shards of glass (!) falling out of the audio port. In May, I got some more, and the port became blocked with glass. I opened the box up (quite easy to do) and cleaned out the audio port as best I can. It now works again.
My guess: this is a combination electronic and optical (S/PDIF) audio port, and the optical part broke. It’s fairly disconcerting to have glass shards fall out of a laptop computer, but now that the port is clean it seems to work (at least electrically :-).
FreeBSD
A Fedora Forum post lists that FreeBSD installs, but neither networking (USB ethernet nor wireless) works.