Dear Sbird,

Thank you again for reporting back to me on your experience. I actually ended up testing the Fedora KDE spin just now, but I found that the camera function button didn’t work for me (not so important). The microphone off function button next to it did work, however, but neither of the indicator lights worked. (Again not such a big deal). The Caps Lock key indicator light worked, however.

I looked into it more and I think that what ASUS had marketed as DC dimming is actually just a software trick, so I don’t think your missing anything with that.

I tested the IR camera, and the webcam, and both worked. If I ever switch that laptop to Linux fulltime I will follow your advice about the Howdy fork!

I was actually able to get the numberpad thing on the trackpad to work, and the gesture to open the calculator even worked well. I think the layout for our laptop would be “M433IA.” It was a little buggy for me though. I couldn’t change the brightness level on it, and some other issues like it stop lighting up and needing to restart the service.

I think the KDE desktop was great that it allows for quarter screened windows easily. I also really like that it has a built in clipboard manager using the windows key plus v, but for some reason copy and paste with the clipboard was a little buggy for me as it wouldn’t work unless I pasted in the same window first and then copied it again somehow.

My main pain point of KDE is actually that it has the four finger swipe up to get an overview of all apps though, putting my pinky finger down just makes it a more cumbersome process for me compared to using the three-figured gesture which seems to be the standard everywhere else.

For now I’ll still be going back to Windows. But I imagine I will probably swtich to Linux completely at some point.

Thank you so much for reporting back that everything works!

And glad to hear that your trackpad issue was fixed! It sounds like it was probably an Asus rather than a Linux issue. For the numberpad on the trackpad did you try using a program like the one below and still not get it working? (Maybe it would be a useful feature if the gesture could be customized, or fun to tinker with):

https://github.com/iamkroot/asus-numpad?tab=readme-ov-file

What I remember from testing Fedora my UP3404 in the summer of 2023 was that there was some strange behavior of the function keys; I remembered that some of the keys which were not brightness keys were changing the brightness too. On Windows I am able to adjust the brightness using both DC dimming (which actually lowers the voltage to the screen to dim it) as well as the standard PWM dimming (which turns the screen off and on fast to make it appear dimmer); is this possible in Linux?

What about the mic off and camera off buttons on the function row? Do even those work? Do they light up? Does the Asus function key do anything or can you make use of it?

I think I will probably switch my laptop over to Linux eventually. The desktop version of Microsoft office is the main Windows app keeping me from switching, as well as a concern that my laptop wouldn’t work with Linux well. I have a older surface pro with debian on it that I just use for browsing the web and doing Linux tinkering (couldn’t setup IR camera Howdy unfortunately). One of my pain points of Linux was removed from Linux now that I found that the Flatpak version of Collabora Office allows for touchscreen scrolling. I just wish that the Gnome desktop would allow for an app to be dragged to a corner to be a quarter of the screen rather than just to the side to be half (but there probably is a good way to do this better than Windows maybe that I need to figure out).

I have the same laptop! Is there anything that didn’t work with it on Linux like function keys lightening up and doing the right things, webcam/IR camera, sleep/suspend, screen rotating in tablet mode turning of the keyboard, etc.? Did you get the number thing on the trackpad and those gestures working? (I never use that though). Can you change fan profiles? Can you do a “flicker free” dimming of the oled screen? On Windows I have a problem where the laptop will always get stuck in “tablet mode,” so I’ve been thinking to switch it to Linux at some point. I tried a live USB boot once at it seems like some of the function keys were acting strange, so I’m especially interested in what you might have noticed from many hours of use (if anything else other than the trackpad issue). Thanks in advance, and I hope your problem is only a software and not a hardware thing.

(I forgot to mention that my same Asus Zenbook had these weird trackpad issues before too on Windows. I forgot what I figured out was going on though. If you press the function key to disable the trackpad on Linux does that work? Does the light display? Maybe try turning the trackpad on and off from there to see if that does anything. Anyway my issue just sort of resolved itself, so you can be hopeful).