ojj.

asus rog flow z13

✍ April 10, 2025 tagged #work #laptop #distro

A while back, my until-then kind-of-trusty Dell XPS 13, stopped charging via USB-C. After disassembly I hooked the 4-cell battery up to my lab UPS overnight in the bathroom and got it to boot (yay for just-in-time backups).

I suppose a more hands-on hacker would call it a success and keep going, the roughed-up chassis, caused by prying it open with a screwdriver, worn as a token of honor from the field of battle. But not me.

We ordered a new machine, a fun and crazy laptop-tablet thing, called Asus ROG Flow Z13. It comes with Windows 11 and some crap from Asus. Oh well, let’s put Linux on it and see how it goes.

#arch linux pt. 1

My previous laptop ran Arch, so I “etched” a new USB with 2025.03.01. The first thing the installer suggests is connecting to the internet, and well fuck_:

No matter what I tried, iw did not manage to connect to my Wi-Fi. I no longer have dmesg logs, but all connection attempts failed within 200ms, including retries…

So I said fuck this, searched around and found Bazzite. I’m no longer playing videogames as much but a gaming-focused distro with patches for the Z13? That’ll do.

#Bazzite for software dev.

Bazzite is built on Fedora and I have no opinions on Fedora. After going through the unfamiliar motions of bootstrapping an atomic system (i.e. image-based so system upgrade is just an image swap, but no clue if that’s a useful definition of atomicity but w/e), I kind of reached a decent status quo:

But the way there was quite painful, as it usually is when doing trial-by-error w/o reading the fucking manual:

Oh well, finally done.

This worked quite okay for couple of weeks and system upgrades until I started to get strange errors, probably due to my bad practice of not putting everything dev-related inside the distrobox container.

Then April came and I said, let’s try again with arch 2025.04.01.

#arch linux pt. 2

Yeah, no. Wi-Fi was still broken.

So over the weekend I did what any self-respecting nerd without time conscience does, and plugged in an ethernet cable and installed arch anyway.

After trying what feels like a bazzillion different things (but probably was closer to a monkey performing the same 3 tricks in different order) I installed NetworkManager.

And the heavens blessed me with Wi-Fi.

Spirits high I started doing my actual bootstrap routine, and after installing hyprland et. al. I noticed my next problem: I could not scroll using the trackpad. For the love of all that is holy, what is going on with this machine? Is the trackpad registering itself as a mouse? No. A tablet? No. A keyboard with a nipple? I mean, maybe?

I’ll gloss over my fruitless search of the www for answers. Defeated and depressed, I was ready to go to bed to the joyful sound of birds laughing at me. Then, while brushing my teeth, I remberered that the touchpad had worked fine on Bazzite, so they must do something right, right!?

Turns out the swell folks over at Bazzite apply patches and compile the linux kernel themselves – AND EVEN PROVIDE IT ON AUR. Praise be, blessed be their name.

Anyway, how to try it out? One hour later, after too much reading about boot setups and how everything is more complicated than I can even imagine, all that was needed was essentially:

sudo kernel-install add-all
sudo bootctl update

Reboot. Now let’s enjoy the modern life that is scrolling.