I say “new”, but it’s not brand new. It’s an Asus Zenbook Duo that’s about three years old.
I was happy with my old System76 laptop, but after years of, sigh, my dumb little cat rubbing her face on the screen, one of the hinges had come loose, and one day when I opened it… crunch. That corner of the screen just came apart. I got it back together with some duct tape and a bolt in the plastic, but ever since then it’s been showing lines of static all over the screen. And it only got worse with time.
Meanwhile the wife got herself a new laptop since hers was not high-end enough for the new FFXIV Dawntrail specs. And this Asus was the one she went with. And I mean, just look at it!
So, yeah, I was a little jealous!
So we saved up some money so I could get one too, and now it’s here, and it’s beautiful and I love it.
It’s not perfect. The first thing I did, of course, was install Linux (Mint this time; I’ve been using Ubuntu for 20 years now, but I’ve been sus of Canonical for half that time). This Reddit post helped me with most of the issues I had. I haven’t set up the speaker sound because I hardly ever use it anyway? I’ll probably get around to that at some point. And I needed this driver to make the combined touchpad/numpad work properly. (I’m not super fond of it. I need actual clicky buttons, these just aren’t the same.)
I needed another app, Hydrapaper, to be able to set up different wallpapers on each monitor. But I can do that now, so that’s cool.
Overall, I just love being able to do things on multiple monitors at once. I’m not a productivity bro, but I need to be able to glance at multiple things or my attention wanders. This is helping with that!
My one regret is that while the Flathub version of xivlauncher works, I get single-digit FPS. Guess I’m staying as a console player for the foreseeable future. Ah well.
