Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Review on ASUS Zenbook UX303UB

ASUS Zenbook UX303UB is a beautiful, thin, light ultrabook. Its beautiful and colorful. It comes in three different colors, Smoky Brown, Icicle Gold and Rose Gold. It has a QHD+(3200 x 1800) display which has a pixel density of 275 pixels per inch. It comes in 6th generation  Intel® Core™ i5 6200U Processor and Intel® Core™ i7 6500U processor. You may check it's specification at asus.com.

I've personally used this laptop since December, 2015. I really like it's beauty and mostly the battery life. The battery life of this laptop is great. It has a 50Whrs 3 Cell polymer battery. I get around 6 hrs to 8hrs of backup. It also charges really fast. For me it takes 2 hrs to complete a full charge.

I installed Ubuntu in this labtop as soon as I bought it. Back then I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It wasn't usable at all. Then I tried Ubuntu 15.10. It hanged on me a lot. My laptop would hang if I closed the lid.

But in April, 2016 just after the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. My linux experience with this laptop has changed. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS runs great in this laptop. Really great!!! I get around 6-7 Hrs runtime on a single charge. My laptop don't get hot anymore. I can even close the lid of my laptop while it's running and open up the lid without worrying. :-) Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on my Zenbook UX303UB didn't hang on me ever since. I am really happy and lucky that I bought this laptop(Although I regreted buying this before the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS)..


This laptop has an integrated NVIDIA 940M 2GB DDR3 Graphics Card, HD Webcam, Integrated 802.11 a/g/n or 802.11 ac, BT 4.0 support (on WLAN+ BT 4.0 combo card). They all work out of the box on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. You have to install the NVIDIA drivers and its easy to do so.

Some of the function keys such as f3(backlit brightness decrease), f4(backlit brightness increase), f9(touchpad enable/disable), f10(mute/unmute), f11(volume up), f12(volume down) works out of the box.
The screen brightness keys (f5 and f7) works with some tweak. Still the others function keys don't work. I hope in future it will be fixed.

The ambient light sensor don't work out of the box. I didn't try to make it work though. Just because I don't need this functionality.

You can check my video on youtube to see Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on ASUS UX303UB in action.

If your laptop gets hot after installing the nvidia drivers, install 'thermald'. thermald is created by intel for monitoring an controlling temperatures of their processors.

You can also install 'powertop' to further increase battery life.

Thats all you have to do to get it up and running with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.


If you guys are looking for a great laptop to run Ubuntu or any other Linux distro, I would recommend ASUS Zenbook UX303UB. 

Official Link:  
ASUS Zenbook UX303UB Homepage


Buy from Amazon: 

Buy ASUS ZenBook UX303UB