So far, I have been using my ASUS ux305 for exactly one week. Needless to say, given its great track record, the laptop itself has been treating me extremely well. I am continually impressed by the way the laptop feels, the keyboard, the screen, and the battery life. Let’s talk about all of those for just a moment.
The way the laptop feels is amazing. Whenever I pick it up, I am confident that it won’t bend or break on me, although it is very light. It’s metal body is nice and smooth and very sleek. I do have a couple very small complaints that are as follows:
- The lid of the laptop has little notches in the back of them. Presumably, these notches are here so that when the laptop is opened, they serve as little “feet” that lift the rear of the keyboard up slightly. I will admit that this creates a more enjoyable experience, as a completely flat laptop keyboard often wears out my wrists from having them rest on the edge of the laptop body. These “feet” have one little drawback, however. Since they are attached to the back of the lid, they scrape along whatever surface the laptop is sitting on. If you’re working on glass, metal, or a hard surface, this is no problem as the “feet” just slide across the surface and into position. However, I did have the misfortune of working on some very soft wood, where the little “feet”, in the process of opening the laptop, actually scraped against the wood and scratched it. Although the idea of the “feet” was amazing, some other way of deploying them would have been great.
- The material of the laptop attracts fingerprints like crazy. You never know how much you actually touch odd spots on your laptop until they are clearly visible after you touch them. The lid and the area below the keyboard both seem to attract fingerprints that makes it look like you slathered a slice of peperoni pizza all over the surface. Of course, I may just have very oily hands, but I think the material of these surfaces also has something to do with it. These finger prints and smudges are also not very easy to remove. I have tried using paper towels, toilet paper, tissue, and the cloths used to clean glasses and computer screens, but to no avail. I just have to be very careful about where I touch.
Besides from those complaints, the laptop is amazing. My 7 hour battery life has not let me down, the 1080p IPS display is gorgeous and has a huge pixel density, and the keyboard feels very nice to type on.
And now to the other point of this post:
Linux
As I covered in the last post, I was able to install Arch Linux on this machine without a hitch. Everything worked properly out of the box, which made me very happy. I am still running SLiM, i3, Conky, and the usual software. Like I said, everything has worked out of the box and using a tiling window manager is a great way to take advantage of the small screen but great resolution. I will report on the exact software I am using a bit later.
