Asus UX303LN and Ubuntu

Hey everyone,

I'm a very happy owner of an Asus UX303LN. So far so good: great piece of hardware with awesome screen, perfect keyboard, and outstanding performance.
It comes with a Windows 8.1 pre-configured that seems to run pretty well. I've been using it for a month now and I must say I'm not a hater. It packs kind of a weird interface to say the least but it works, and metro plays well with the touch screen.

That being said I'd like to install Ubuntu. I'm an of Elementary OS lover (partly because it ran so well on my old XPS 15z) and I've also used Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora for a long time for doing Ruby and node.js development. Right now I'm surviving with an Ubuntu server virtual machine but I'd like to go back to Linux as soon as I can.

However, I bumped into a few problems when trying Ubuntu the last time. It was not unexpected at all: new hardware, new problems but I thought of opening this thread and maybe helping each other. I'm sure that with each passing week / month support will be improving gradually and one may be able to jump to Ubuntu with almost no problems in one's plate.

As of now, Ubuntu 14.04.01 LTS is installing successfully with no effort (disabling UEFI), but:

1) Battery life is less than desirable. Installing bumblebee gives you no more that 3:30 hours, while in Windows I get 6 tweaking the power schemes
2) HiDPIsupport in Ubuntu is acceptable but not great While it scales menues (settings menu) which is very nice and quite unexpected on my part applications still do not behave well. Google Chrome and Firefox look pretty ugly even after doing some zoom tweaking, for example.
3) Function keys do not work
4) Touchpad works, but you cannot use any gestures.

I haven't tried Linux Mint or Fedora yet. Elementary OS stable Luna does not boot. Freya boots but is still a beta. Maybe I could give it a try.

 

1) Are you able to confirm that it is defaulting to the intel graphics after using bumblebee? Maybe try running some simple benchmarks and compare to see if you can get a performance difference?
2) HiDPI is still a work in progress... Cinnamon (Linux Mint default) probably has the best support out of the box. There are also ways to do pixel doubling without worrying about scaling if you want to try it.
3) It could be because 14.04 uses a fairly old kernel. Though the full hardware enablement stack won't be out for a couple months the updated kernel is available through trusty-updates. The packages is linux-image-generic-lts-utopic. You could also simply try 14.10 for the newer kernel and firmware.
4) This is typical honestly... you could try ginn but I haven't had much success.

 

1) Spend some time with Laptop Mode Tools and such. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_saving

3) What function keys? If they are audio control, screen brightness, etc., try acpi_osi=Linux or even Windows.
4) Tap/Scroll or Win 8 style touch gestures? If the former it's usually disabled by default but you can enable it via your DE's settings or xinput. If the later there's nothing we can do.