A developer and Arch Linux package maintainer explains why they installed Linux on their ASUS ProArt P16 H7607 BA-SE033W, a laptop with 128 GB of RAM, 6,144 CUDA cores and a 2 TB SSD. Their main reasons are a dislike of Windows, including privacy concessions during setup, long-standing UI complaints and advertising, and a wish to run open-weight models locally. The developer already publishes GGUF quantizations on Hugging Face, with over 160,000 downloads in the past month, so official Windows-only support for the hardware was a drawback.
The build uses Arch Linux ARM with hardware support added on top. It starts from NVIDIA's Ubuntu kernel work, includes fixes for ACPI override allocation and framebuffer mapping needed to get a console, and derives ACPI overrides from the laptop's own tables. A patched hid-asus driver handles the keyboard, and a dedicated machine driver handles audio. The NVIDIA driver and ASUS speaker firmware come from official sources. The installer is an extended version of upstream Archinstall 4.5, and the build inputs are hash-pinned. The display runs at 3840 × 2400 and 120 Hz, with NetworkManager, PipeWire and rootless Podman using NVIDIA CDI.
In 7-Zip tests on native ARM64 builds, single-thread performance was roughly tied with published Windows results for the same 20-core N1X chip. With all 20 threads, the Linux setup was about 5% faster at compression and 3% faster at decompression. The developer notes that these figures compare two different laptop setups rather than a controlled test.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing