Review on ASUS Zenbook S14 Laptop (LNL) with Linux

2025-05-02

I am trying to pick a laptop that is as close to Macbook Mx Airs as possible - light, low power consumption and long battery life, with the only exception of not being an Apple device^[1][2][3] - for the upcoming coursework. As for the chip itself, the closest I can get is Intel's Lunar Lake CPUs whose successor unfortunatelly Intel will not develop due to their management incompetentness. Among all LNL laptops, it seems that ASUS Zenbook S14 is of top quality, has a reasonable price and does not repulse Linux like Lenovo's counterpart Yoga^[4].

According to a GitHub repo (more on this repo later), LNL is well-supported on Linux 6.12.5+, which is not a problem on my OpenSUSE TW. It mostly works out of the box, has nice secure boot and TPM2.0 support, with the need to install sof-firmware for the audio to work. Surprisingly, the NPU card has its driver intel_vpu loaded. I've yet to test it, which Intel promotes as having 47 TOPS; I was really tempted to try out the NPU in the pre-installed Windows but gave up when copilot forced me to login my Microsoft Account.

The battery life is as good as it promoted. As the writing of this post, which happens to be my expected workflow with this laptop, I am working on my Emacs with some trivial packages and the built-in Mozilla Firefox with about 20 pages loaded (no heavy media); in the background there is a syncthing daemon running, a Mozilla Thunderbird, a Libreoffice Writer and an Akregator; my desktop is KDE and has no special customization. Under a battery of 70%, screen brightness 20% and power profile set to powersave, the estimated battery life reaches 8 hours. Expect a charger-free day when your job only involves light office-work or light development. The laptop is also quite pleasantly chilly, whose CPU sits under 40C in the room temperature of 25C. One can barely feel any heat on the chasis.

It does have some quirks, though, with the first being KDE seemingly not recognizing my graphics card. It kept telling me it's using llvmpipe while actually utilizing the GPU. The information is fixed by installing intel-vaapi-driver. The second counter-intuitive point is that intel_gpu_top doesn't work on such xe GPUs. It's an easy fix as nvtop is a nice replacement to it.

The last issue was not trivial and took me three days to find the cause. The laptop occasionally slowed down until I reboot and cpupower frequency-info showed me that CPU frequency policy was randomly throttled to only 400MHz max and changing the governer had zero help. I suspected on BD_PROCHOT, even a faulty sensor in my laptop, but rdmsr showed no signs of error. I asked for help on OpenSUSE forum, Tom's Hardware forum and even Reddit. The issue is eventually clarified by a dude met in the previously mentioned repo. It seems that powertop has some iffy interaction with the firmware and randomly throttles max frequency even if I only use the monitor part of it. The issue has never occured after stopping using powertop.

That's all for now, and I'm overall pretty satisfied with this machine and consider it a pretty close approximation of the Macbook M1 Air.