Installing Linux and Windows on the Asus Q325

Why?

Because I have returned to school for my masters degree, and because my current laptop is EOL and has less than 2hrs of battery life I decided that it is time to upgrade. 

I wanted a modern laptop:

• Plenty of RAM (8 GB min, 16 GB ideal)
• Large SSD (512 GB, going to be dual booting Windows and Linux)
• Core i7 7th generation 
• 1920x1080 display or higher 
• Long (6 hour min) battery life
• Light weight and thin (5 pounds or less and 2cm thick or less)

So basically I wanted an ultrabook.

I looked at a few models, but decided against them for the following reasons:

Laptop	Issue
Asus Zenbook UX330UA	Couldn't find a reputable seller
Samsung Notebook 9 Pro NP940X5M-X01US	Nice laptop, but I couldn't find one with a 512GB SSD
ASUS M580VD-EB76 VivoBook	Online reviews indicated it had a bad display, poor battery life a cheap build quality
Dell XPS9350-8008SLV	I really liked this laptop, it had really good specs, but online reviews indicated QC and reliability issues.

I choose the Asus Q325 because it was thin and light, met all my quantified requirements (Core i7, 512 GB SSD and 16 GB Ram, 1 cm thick, 2.5 lbs, 14 hr battery life (advertised)) and with the Best Buy student discount came out to just under $1k. However it has no standard USB ports, no display ports, no ethernet, just a pair of USB C ports. If the Wifi doesn't work on the laptop it would be disastrous. The biggest problem is that I was only able to find one mention of someone installing Linux on the computer, and they didn't explain how they did it.

I took a risk, decided to jump off a cliff, buy the Q325, and hope to land on BB's 15 day return policy if I mess up horribly.

The Goal

My goal is to dual boot Windows 10 and Debian 9 Stretch. I like Linux, the community and the possibilities it offers, but the moment my professor says "we will be using X proprietary program for this class" I would have to turn to Wine or virtualization to run the application, which have their own issues. 

Pre-purchase research

My first step was to see if the computer has a linux compatible wifi chipset. From my research the Q325 has an Intel 8260 wifi chip and is supported on Linux with the iwlwifi driver.

Other than checking if the wifi chipset is compatible, I checked nothing else. There are no discrete graphics on this laptop, it only has an Intel 620, so there won't be any additional drivers I need to worry about.

Installing

The only way to boot a new OS on the Q325 is from a USB drive attached to a dongle. Fortunately ASUS provides a bit of a docking station with a USB 3.0, an HDMI and another USB C port, so you can boot from a USB drive with what's in the box. I decided to purchase an insignia USB Type-C to Type-A adaptor as well for the installation of the Linux Wifi drivers later on (they need to be placed on another removable drive to be loaded). 

I started first with installing Windows. I do this so that when I install Linux, Windows will already be there for GRUB to detect and I should be dual booting without a hitch. 

I downloaded an .iso though my University and used Rufus to create a bootable USB. I was only able to boot from the drive when I used "MBR partition scheme for UEFI" under the Partition scheme and target system type section. Using the default produces an unbootable drive. 

The Windows install went smoothly. I had to press the 'esc' key on bootup to enable the BIOS to boot into the USB drive instead of the hard drive. The Asus BIOS is really riced out, but works well, I was able to quickly change the boot order.

Windows 10 automatically detected my wifi chip and selected the necessary drivers for it. Updates required me to download over 4GB of data and this took about an hour after loading the data and rebooting several times. 

For Debian, I created a bootable USB drive on my Mac using instructions from tinned-software.net. The only thing that didn't work was the last step, where Mac OS didn't recognize the disk it had just created and wouldn't let me unmount the USB drive. Regardless, I was delighted that the computer booted the installer on the first try. 

When I installed Debian I was unable to get the mousepad to work on the initial graphical install. I had to use the keys to navigate the installer. When I got to the wifi firmware section (which is crucial because the computer does not have Ethernet) I needed to scrounge around on the Internet to find all the firmware blobs (iwlwifi-8000C-[17-26].ucode files) I needed. You can't get them all from one place either, but you can download some of the firmware from the Linux kernel website, the remainder of it can be downloaded from this git repo. I downloaded the iwlwifi-8000C-[17-26].ucode files and placed it on a FAT32 formatted flash drive and plugged into the computer with another dongle.
Once the firmware was acquired I was able to use the laptops Wifi, which worked without issue for the rest of the install. 

After restarting, Debian did in fact boot. I had, not only full mouse support now, but touch support as well on gnome. 

When I rebooted back into Windows the Windows boot loader said it failed to boot properly. Uh-oh, I thought, I may have to do a reinstall of Windows. I rebooted again and found that I could boot into Windows just fine. Seems to have been a one-time glitch. 

Wrapping Up

My intuition with the laptop was correct. I was able to dual boot Windows and Linux on it and the major features (graphical UI and Wifi) work on both.

Minor issues with the laptop:

• The hinge between the screen and the body is designed such that the screen hits the surface its sitting on before the body if it's tilted more than 90 degrees. 
• The thing attracts and retains fingerprints like a fiend. I may have to rub it down with alcohol every now and then to keep it clean. 

I want to underscore that those are minor issues and not significant in the use of the laptop. These are just keep this from being perfect in my opinion. 

The laptop effectively gets 8 hours of battery life, less than the advertised 14, but still meets my requirements. The touchscreen support is nice, I didn't think I would like it but it gives me another point of control besides the keyboard and mouse.

I also tried to game on it. This is by no means a gaming laptop, but I was able to play Kerbal Space Program on it at 720p resolution.

I tried launching the Dynawing into orbit. In many places (launching and main tank separation) the frame rate was slow, but other places the frame rate was smooth. There wasn't any terrible stuttering. The experience wasn't great, but it was adequate. This laptop is certainly a viable option for light, non-competitive game play. Although battery life did suffer and went down to just 2 hours.