Hi all!
I’m not much of a forum person, but I thought I’d introduce myself before sharing something.
A little about me:
Dennis, 47 years young (or old, depending on the day).From the Netherlands.
Linux desktop user since the Windows 2000 era.
Linux server user since 1995.
Network administrator and full-time Linux nerd.
AI enthusiast (yeah, I know…). Professional consumer of tech and car videos on YouTube.
I’ve been following this community for quite a while.
Recently, I bought an ASUS ProArt P14 with NVIDIA N1X hardware. Naturally, the first thing that came to mind was: how do I get Linux running on this thing?
Apparently, buying a perfectly good laptop and immediately trying to replace its operating system is still one of my favourite hobbies.
Anyway, after a few hours of experimenting, combining existing community work, troubleshooting and quite a bit of AI-assisted coding (or vibe coding, if you prefer), I got Ubuntu 26.10 ARM64 running natively.
And not just booting into a terminal. An actual, usable desktop.
**Here’s the repository:
On github go to /dpwacky and you will find what has been made so far.**
So, what actually works?
Quite a lot, surprisingly!
NVIDIA GPU: The NVIDIA driver loads correctly, and nvidia-smi works. I’ve also been able to allocate up to 96 GB of GPU memory without problems.
Desktop: GNOME is running, including XWayland support.
Keyboard and touchpad: Both work, including keyboard backlight controls through the desktop menu and function keys.
Audio: Sound works, and volume can be adjusted using the function keys.
Connectivity: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are working.
Battery and power management: Both are functioning properly, including battery status reporting.
Display brightness: Adjustable through the GNOME menu, although the brightness function keys aren’t working yet.
Video playback: Chrome and Firefox can both play videos smoothly up to 1080p. Higher resolutions are still somewhat choppy. Video playback currently requires a workaround, as the software and driver support are still in a beta stage.
So yes, there are still a few rough edges, but for something that wasn’t supposed to run Ubuntu out of the box, I’m pretty happy with the result.
I haven’t tested vLLM or any serious AI workloads yet. That’s still on my list.
One important detail: my laptop originally shipped with BIOS 300. Windows Update upgraded it to BIOS 303, which is what I’m currently using. Interestingly, that BIOS version wasn’t available on the ASUS support download page when I checked.
And yes, I used Windows to update the BIOS. No hard feelings, Microsoft.
A few things worth mentioning:
I can only confirm that this works on my own ASUS ProArt P14. I can’t promise compatibility with other manufacturers or even the P16.
I’m not a professional Linux developer, and I don’t intend to become a full-time maintainer of this project. I simply enjoy experimenting with technology.
A lot of the hard work was already done by people in the Linux community. I used AI tools to help put the pieces together faster, but I don’t want to pretend I invented any of the underlying work. The repository includes references to the projects and patches that helped make this possible.
Hopefully, some of that information will also be useful for getting other distributions running on similar hardware.
I’m sharing this because I believe useful experiments shouldn’t have to stay on someone’s personal machine.
And no, I’m not looking for recognition, followers or anything like that.
I just wanted Linux on my laptop.
If this helps even one other person get theirs running, I’ll consider the whole experiment a success.
Cheers,
Dennis
P.S. I don’t hate Windows. I simply switched to Linux a long time ago and never really looked back. Old habits die hard.