As I lie in bed messing around with my ux305, there are a few things that I have noticed that are driving me a little crazy. Since I am too tired to formulate my thoughts in a formal way, I shall simply use bullets to express them.
- There seems to be a fair amount of light-bleed coming from the right side and the bottom of this laptop’s gorgeous screen. If I press on the bezel of either of these sides, I notice that the lightbleed grows towards the center of the screen. This does not happen on the left or the top and I don’t have much experience with lightbleed, so I don’t know how bad or normal this actually is.
- Binding the brightness keys has proven to be a challenge in Arch Linux. Running `xev`, I have determined that the keys assigned XF86MonBrightnessUp and XF86MonBrightnessDown are actually the keys located to the left of the brightness keys (The keys without any indication of what they are.. the blank keys). This is truly problematic and I will look into a solution. As far as my knowledge goes, this is a Linux problem.
Anyway, I digress.
RE: UX305
Hey there,
Thanks for posting this all up. I purchased an ASUS ux305 and I have Ubuntu 15.04 running without issues except the brightness keys. I did some binds against xbacklight to solve the issue. There is a kernel bug open for a variety of ASUS models and the brightness keys not sending key events. Haven’t looked what is going on upstream though, I noticed the keys to left of mine were actually set as keyboard backlight dim +/-.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1348890
Also you touched on the light bleed you were noticing. How bad is it? Mine is pretty horrible. Enough to make me want to try another machine. Here is mine: http://imgur.com/H2y3Cgu It is pretty horrible. It is noticeable easily even below 50% brightness.
Battery life after installing TLP has been great. I don’t really have any other grievances with this piece of hardware. I wanted a XPS 13 2015 originally but I don’t like the adaptive contrast and it is much more expensive for the specs. I rather like fanless and lower amount of heat coming from this unit. There is also the HP Folio 1020 G1 which seems like it could be a real winner in comparison exception similar specs come out to almost double that of the ux305.
Hopefully I can get over this lightbleed….
Regards,
Bryan
Hey Bryan,
Great to hear from another ux305 owner! I’m also glad to hear that I am not the only one experiencing the brightness key issue. I am currently running Linux 4.0 and I still have the same issue, where running
xevdoes not seem to trigger any events for the actual brightness keys. I don’t mind all that much, however, since I am perfectly happy using the wrong keys to adjust brightness, since those keys weren’t meant to do anything anyways (I’m referring to the F3 and F4 keys that you also referred to).As far as light bleed goes, your light bleed seems to be far worse than mine. However, I am sharing some of the same spots as you (Mine is mainly coming from the right side, in the same places that yours is). I don’t have the machine with me at the moment, but when I get the chance I will try to take a picture to compare. I am positive that it is not as bad as yours, however. I was thinking about RMAing my machine so that I could get a lightbleed-free replacement. I’m not sure if ASUS would be willing to do anything about it.
I agree with you on all other fronts! The battery life is great, the keyboard is great, the fanless design is great. It does get a tad hot sometimes, but it’s nothing too annoying at all. Overall, after about 1.5 months of usage, I’m still loving this machine!
Thanks for stopping by!
Brandon
Started having a look at where the acpi bug could be and/or if I need to add something. Maybe if I find time and enough boredom I may try to patch it myself.
It would be great if you take a picture for sure! Mine seems pretty horrible. My 4+ year Latitude’s TN panel does a much much better job with the bleed but much worse in all other aspects.
Regards,
Bryan Paradis
I went ahead and added some information about the brightness keys to the machine’s ArchWiki page at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ASUS_Zenbook_UX305 — If you have anything to add, I urge you to contribute so that we can get all questions about Arch and this machine squared away!
Also I went ahead and took a picture of my lightbleed (Sorry for the quality!). As you can see, it’s actually pretty similar to yours and arises from the same locations. http://i.imgur.com/MRsKcI2.jpg
In addition if you use chrome remember to enable hardware video acceleration by startin chrome or chromium with –ignore-gpu-blacklist. 4K video went from 35-40% to 10% CPU. Way less heat watching youtube etc.
Need to have chromium beta I believe as well. I managed to break it again :( I will see if I can get it working properly again. Pretty sad we don’t have HW acceleration yet for html videos on linux