Arch Linux

jagodap

Member

Registered: 2025-09-03

Posts: 2

Arch on Asus zenbook, workaround for severall issues

Hi there:

This post is to share my experience with Arch on my newly bought computer. I mainly post this because after many many hours of trying to fix things, I realized that I was not the only one having similar issues and maybe someone may benefit from this.

I  recently  bought an Asus Zenbook UX3405CA, Intel® Core™ Ultra 9,  32 gb RAM and 1 Tb of SSD storage. By far the most powerful machine I have ever had. Now, all hardware is Intel, that is, GPU, wifi card and the rest. I duly proceeded to remove Windows as soon as the PC was in my hands, but I found out that neither Mint, Debian or Ubuntu (which I was running away from) worked properly, failing to give me bluetooth connection, wifi connection, or both, no matter how I tried. Only Fedora did work, but with extremely long boot times, random freezing and a general experience that did not satisfy me. I finally decided to try Arch (I know this post might belong to Newbie Corner but I think this is a more adequate place) and things changed for the better, if only for a while. The issues came back. Very slow booting (altough ranging from 20 seconds to 3 minutes with no particular reason), random freezing of applications, random slow launching of common applications like Brave, Libreoffice or VLC.

Among other things, I tried:

- Disable network manager from being launched at boot
- Disanble gnome software and other grome services from being launched at startup (this only made things worse and I had to reverse)
- Define and redefine several permissions for applications, both during boot and when the system was already up (for instance, rendering from CPU for applications like Brave and Rstudio instead  of GPU, although I also had to reverse because the system did not significantly improved and things got really worse for some tasks)

I could go on and on, but it would be redundant. The problem, I think is kernel related, since my hardware is 100% intel and some firmware is conspicously absent (including, unfortuately, firmware for my SSD drive).

To make a long story short, and to gice some advice to any one having similar issues, I accidentally found out that two things really helped me to have a much more pleasant relationship with my machine;

1) Reinstall intel drivers:

 sudo pacman -S mesa lib32-mesa vulkan-intel lib32-vulkan-intel 

I really noticed an imrpovement after doing this. By the way, I only did it a week or so ago and I have not needed to do it again. Boot time significantly shortened

2) Once the system was up, I kept having problems in terms of random freezing and very slow launch of common applications, crucially, with no particular pattern (I have spent hours checking journalctl logs). I accidentally stumbled on a workaround that so far has proven really effective: restarting Gnome:

 killall -3 gnome-shell 

When I do this, my session closes, I reenter my password and get back in, but unlñike before (almost) everything works smoother.

I do not claim by any means to have found a definitive solution. I simply share this just in case my this might help someone. By the way… I had never tried Arch before this and I probable never would have if my machine had worked fine on, say, Mint. However, I am really delighted by how this distro works. Defnitively worth changing installing/removing habits. I think I’ll stay here for a long while. Also installed Arch on a Dell old machine and it works like a charm.

Best regards

Last edited by jagodap (2025-09-03 17:07:03)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,857

Re: Arch on Asus zenbook, workaround for severall issues

Reinstalling the same exact software stack does normally have no impact, unless that just happen to coincide with an actual update that included those packages, which is fairly possible, there were some crashers and bugs  in earlier mesa 25.2 versions particularly with intel which got subsequently fixed in the newer minor releases. Another option would be accidentally having picked mesa-amber despite having new enough GPUs

A general tip here, make sure xf86-video-intel is not installed.

As for the gnome-shell crasher, did you check whether it has some abnormal memory usage or so when you kill it? Are you using non-standard extensions?

jagodap

Member

Registered: 2025-09-03

Posts: 2

Re: Arch on Asus zenbook, workaround for severall issues

Thanks for the reply.  I think mesa-amber is indeed present, although I do not know whether it is set up as default. Will check that and the x86-video-intel installation and see if things get better . Gnome  does have abnormal memory usage, but I have not installed any particular extensions.

Thanks again for ypur tips.

Regards