Wow, the ASUS X13 (2022) convertible notebook is a nice nVidia GTX 3050Ti thin and light notebook. It is on sale for $1300 at Best Buy right now and it has a Ryzen 6000 processor with 16GB of memory and 1TB hard drive. There are some things that are hard to do:
- Turned the thing on. I’m too used to the Mac so it was impossible to find the on/off button or activate it. It is located as a dark button on the right side of the keyboard and is nearly impossible to find. Also, you need to long-press to make it start.
- At least for me, the battery was not charged enough to start, but at least this is USB C powered. At least for me, the battery was so far down, it needed the included charger.
- Once started, you boot into Windows 10 and you need your Microsoft.com password and then it will take about 30 minutes to load Windows 11.
- The thing will ask you how to program the fingerprint reader. There are no documents in the box (but hilariously, there is a piece of cardboard with obscure Ikea instructions so you can make a triangular rest. I’m not sure why they did that.
- The fingerprint reader by the way is built into the power button but again there is no indications about this.
Now to install Ubuntu things are even more mysterious:
- You need to get a USB installer for Ubuntu, so first
brew install balenaetcherwhich will install a USB installer. - Then you need a magic URL from the Ubuntu downloader like this one for Ubuntu 22.04 and you download that ISO
- Then crank up Baleen Etcher and you can flash a USB key.
- Plug the USB key into the X13. One annoying thing is that it only one USB C and one USB A key, so I use the USB C for the battery and then you need a USB-A key
- Now you long press to turn off the machine
- Then short press the power on button and then hold the F12 key down and you will get to the Windows recovery menu. Click on boot from USB.
- You will see Ubuntu come up and ask if it should boot. The nouveau default driver for the nVidia card does not work, so make sure to click, and boot with standard graphics.
- Now you will be asked how to partition the drive. On a 1TB drive, the default is half for Linux and Windows, so that’s not bad.
Post installation with drivers
For the ROG X13, now you need to install an additional set of drivers:
- Ubuntu nVidia driver. This is actually pretty easy and after you get Ubuntu running without GPU acceleration. But basically you run
ubuntu autoinstalland it should work. - The fingerprint reader does not seem to work.
