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🐧 My Experience Running Linux on the Asus Zenbook 14S (UX5406SA)

I recently got my hands on the sleek and shiny Asus Zenbook 14S (UX5406SA) — a solid ultrabook powered by the new Intel Core Ultra 7 258V (Lunar Lake) chip, packed with 32GB RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD.

Naturally, my first instinct was: "Time to dual-boot Arch on this beast!" 😎

🛠️ Upgrading the NVMe SSD

To comfortably dual-boot both Windows and Linux, I decided to upgrade the internal NVMe drive from 1TB to 2TB as unfortunately there's only one NVMe slot available. I didn’t want to reinstall Windows from scratch, so here’s what I did:

  1. Grabbed a bootable Clonezilla USB.
  2. Plugged the new 2TB NVMe into a NVMe-to-USB dongle.
  3. Booted from the Clonezilla USB and cloned the original drive to the new one.
  4. Swapped the drives — easy peasy. The back cover is quite simple to open, and the NVMe slot is super accessible.

After that, Windows booted just fine — mission accomplished ✅

🐧 Installing Arch Linux

Next step: install the real OS 😉

  1. Created a bootable Arch Linux USB drive.
  2. Disabled Secure Boot temporarily.
  3. Booted from the USB and installed Arch on the free space left on the new 2TB drive.

I went for this partition layout:

  • A new UEFI partition (because the one used by Windows is too small to also include Linux EFI images)
  • A root partition, which I encrypted with LUKS (I'll cover the details in a separate post 🔐)

🎵 What Works (and What Didn’t At First)

Most things worked right out of the box, but as always, there was one little hiccup:

❌ Sound? Nope.

After install, there was no audio output — not even a peep. 😤

✅ Sound? Yep.

Installed sof-firmware, rebooted... 🎶 Problem solved.

1sudo pacman -S sof-firmware

🔋 Power Management

I'm aiming for battery-friendly Linux on this laptop, so I started with:

✅ tlp

Good ol' tlp gave me around 10 hours of battery life, which is pretty impressive for a Linux setup on brand-new hardware.

But... there's a new challenger.

🧪 Testing tuned (from RedHat)

I've just started experimenting with tuned, which integrates with Plasma better, as you can directly change the power profile from the battery icon in the task bar.

It seems promising — especially for toggling between powersave, balanced, and performance modes. I’ll report back soon in a follow-up post 📈

🔐 Secure Boot — Coming Soon

Once everything was stable, I re-enabled Secure Boot. The configuration deserves its own tutorial, so I’ll cover it in a dedicated article.

Spoiler alert: it does work! You can have Secure Boot + Arch Linux together, with a little effort 💪

💬 Conclusion

The Asus Zenbook 14S (UX5406SA) is a fantastic ultrabook. With a bit of tweaking:

  • ✅ Windows runs flawlessly
  • ✅ Arch Linux boots beautifully
  • ✅ Performance and battery life are excellent
  • ✅ All major components are working, even audio and power management

Would I recommend this laptop for Linux users? 100% yes.
Modern, powerful, and not (too) annoying to tinker with — what more can a geek ask for? 🖥️🐧🔥

Stay tuned for upcoming articles on:

  • 🔐 Secure Boot setup
  • 🔒 Full disk encryption with LUKS
  • ⚡ tuned vs tlp power management showdown

Cheers,
Ben 👨‍💻