By skyforbes I have been using the Zenbook S14 UX5406SA for almost a year. I was running Windows 11 on it because it was serving my needs pretty fine. I use my laptop for my personal chores (web browsing), light gaming and watching videos online.
As I started traveling and started using my laptop more and more, I noticed that the standby battery was absolutely terrible. It would easily drain >5% per hour. I messed with Windows power settings to limit the CPU %age usage, killing all background processes and uninstalling all the programs I don't need. I did see a slight bump in the battery life, but it was still a far cry from being satisfactory.
I did some research on how Ubuntu compares to Windows in terms of battery life, and it was mostly mixed. Instead of going all in I decided to split my 1 TB partition into two halves, keeping the Windows Boot Manager in case I would need it in future for Windows-specific tasks.
Installing Ubuntu was the standard affair. Getting the USB drive ready, booting into the installer, the installation process itself, was very fast and hassle-free. I was installing on a separate partition on the same drive, for which I had to turn off the Bitlocker encryption first. Slight annoyance, but worth the effort.
Launching Ubuntu desktop made me realize how clean and utilitarian the UI is compared to Win11. There are some shortcuts that I had to get used to, but overall I absolutely love it. I moved the dock to the bottom because I use MacOS extensively at work.
I decided to start installing the necessary apps, starting with Steam, Spotify and Chrome. I got to know that there are multiple ways to install the applications. Either you install it from Snap, if it is published at all, or you get the Debian package. It's a slight bit confusing, but okay.
Throughout the entire affair I noticed one thing, the battery usage was **amazing**. I managed to get full 8 hours of heavy usage on a full charge compared to 4-5 on Win11. In addition to that, the standby battery usage is phenomenal. I barely see any dip in the battery after I put the laptop on standby. This is the closest I have seen this laptop perform when compared to to MacOS.
With all that, everything is just snappy. Apps launch instantly, wake up from standby is insanely fast, all actions are very responsive.
Here comes the headache part. I was noticing that Steam and Spotify were blurry. I looked this problem up and it turned out that Ubuntu 24.04 switched to Wayland display server as it's default option. Apps that were written with X11 in mind, like Steam and Spotify, do not scale to HiDPI screens in Wayland mode.
Upon switching to XOrg from the login menu, everything looked crisp. But there was a problem, some games in Steam didn't have audio output. After some tinkering here and there, I found a very hidden post about how PulseAudio driver had problems with multiple audio sources. After almost a day of debugging, I found this samaritan posting a fix about increasing the buffer size here. Rebooted, and voila. That did the trick! All games are working perfectly with audio intact.
For the folks who are on the fence:
- Ubuntu is extremely lean and fast. If your primary concern with Windows is the bloat and you want to trim it out, Ubuntu is a no brainer.
- It's still an OS with programmers in mind. If you have zero programming experience, and do not wish to spend the time to figure the problems out, stay away. Ubuntu has come a far way, but it still needs some commitment from the users to configure the drivers as per your hardware. It doesn't work out of the box as well as Windows.
- It's the closest thing to MacOS you can have on a Windows machine. If you want a good balance between regular desktop OS and a programming environment, it's the best choice you have in market.
- App compatibility **may** be a problem, do research if the applications you use on a regular basis are available on Ubuntu and work as expected.
Hope this post helps!