For me, the ASUS Zenbook 14 with AMD Ryzen 7 CPU and AMD Radeon GPU is an awesome laptop for travelling: It's light (1.2kg), powerful enough by far, it can be charged via USB-C, and importantly: Debian GNU/Linux works well on it.

My initial pick was the much less expensive Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x. Unfortunately its Snapdragon CPU was not supported by Debian at the time I tried it. So I went with the Zenbook instead, which is still comparatively affordable, and even lighter.

I installed the XFCE-version of Debian 13 (Trixie) from an USB-stick without any problems: Hammer F2 when the laptop boots to enter the BIOS, and configure it to boot from USB.

To make the laptop run cooler, I deactivated (or more precisely: prevent tasks to be scheduled for) all CPU cores except core 0 and 15, with the following kernel option in /etc/default/grub: 
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet isolcpus=1-14"
followed by $ sudo update-grub.

2 cores are more than sufficient for what I use this laptop when travelling, I'm serious. With this setup, the laptop remains cool enough, and the fan stays off during almost every type of work I do on this machine.

To prevent occasional hangs under X11 that occur when using it with GPU acceleration, I disabled GLX by creating the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/disable-gpu.conf with content: 
Section "Extensions"
    Option "GLX" "Disable"
EndSection
With this change, X11 works reliably for me.

I set CAPSLOCK to act as Ctrl key everywhere (in X11 and on terminals) by stating in /etc/default/keyboard: 
XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:nocaps"
To enable the Touchpad in Lightdm, I created /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-libinput.conf with content: 
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "ASUE120C:00 04F3:32D8 Touchpad"
                MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Driver "libinput"
        Option "Tapping" "on"
EndSection
In ~/.fvwm/config, I added: 
Key XF86MonBrightnessUp   A N Exec exec brightnessctl set +5%
Key XF86MonBrightnessDown A N Exec exec brightnessctl set 5%-

Key XF86AudioRaiseVolume   A   N   Exec exec amixer -q set Master 2%+
Key XF86AudioLowerVolume   A   N   Exec exec amixer -q set Master 2%-
Key XF86AudioMute          A   N   Exec exec amixer -q set Master toggle
This makes function keys that set brightness and volume work in FVWM3.

One remaining issue that occurred only once so far: The laptop not shutting down as intended, and displaying a GPU-related error message on the terminal instead. I "solved" this by pressing and holding the on/off button until the machine shut down. I should have taken a photo instead to know what the exact issue was. If this issue happens to you, please take a picture and let me know.

If this page helped you, please let me know. Thank you a lot!


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