Hi folks, I’ve been going on a bit of a journey trying to get my laptop to work on Linux - ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 2024. Started on Kubuntu, asusctl isn’t supported on it any more. Switched to Nobara 43 hoping it would help being on a more recent kernel, but it still handles dGPU control poorly. I’ve been reading a lot of NVIDIA documentation and the Arch wiki, believe me I’ve tried all of the recommended config changes. I don’t love the idea of a rolling release, I don’t want to have to be fixing things after every update, but I’m hopeful that asusctl/supergfxctl will work better over here since the asus-linux.org team officially includes it in their instructions.
Anyway tl;dr am I correct in thinking I can dual boot Nobara and CachyOS by manually adjusting the partitions during install to make a second boot and root partitions? Will GRUB automatically recognize the second boot partition after install or do I need to do something extra for that like in the Windows dual boot instructions?
And if anybody is running CachyOS with KDE on a ROG Zephyrus I’d love to hear your experience. Specifically, does the NVIDIA card correctly go into D3cold power state when not in use (i.e. on battery)? Thanks in advance.
During install, just point /boot/efi to the GRUB partition and it’ll install to it.
After installing and booting (this really should be enabled by default IMO), you need to enable os probing in GRUB by uncommenting GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false in /etc/default/grub, then run
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
and it should immediately scan for the other filesystems and add them to the GRUB boot menu.
Or if it’s on another drive then just make a new ESP on that drive and ignore this.
Both on the same drive, so yes thanks that’s the step I was wondering about. I know Windows requires a lot of futzing around to get it to dual boot but wasn’t sure about other Linux installs. Sounds doable! Looking forward to trying it out.
That’s good to hear. I don’t mind doing some work setting things up but once I’ve got it the way I want it I don’t want to have to constantly do maintenance. I mean Windows was constantly breaking things every other month so as long as Cachy is doing better than that I’m fine I guess.
well… you can’t completely avoid that, I’m afraid. As mentioned several times in this forum, an Arch system will never be a install-once-then-forget-about-it solution. Eventually, you will have to deal with *.pacnew files, the pacman cache and lots of other little things. You should definitely take a look at the Arch Wiki page on system maintenance, @cscs 's Maclean script, this video and maybe this one, too.
Also, if you are using BTRFS, you might want to deactivate CoW at least on /var/tmp/
Thank you for sharing your advice. If I had a different machine I would happily stay on Ubuntu. I am much more familiar with Debian systems. Unfortunately on Ubuntu I do not have asusctl support and therefore my fans do not run properly and the laptop overheats. I switched to Fedora, which solved the fan problem, but I still only get about 2-3 hours of battery life instead of 5-6 because the NVIDIA GPU will not ever go into D3cold/suspend state even when nothing is using it. I have been through the Arch wiki and many forum posts as well as the actual Linux driver documentation trying to find the correct configuration changes to fix it, but it just isn’t working and I have already spent hours on this. So as far as I see my options, I can either switch to Arch or try to kludge something with envycontrol to manually turn off the dGPU on battery and stay on Fedora. And that is what lead me here to seeing if I can dual boot CachyOS because your documentation is much more promising on handling the hybrid GPU and ASUS BIOS control issues. If CachyOS works (and it isn’t an issue inherent to the NVIDIA drivers) I suppose I will just have to live with any of the issues inherent to a rolling distro, at least until the other distros catch up.
I am in theory the exact person who could help you with this since I switched from Nobara KDE to CachyOS KDE on a Zephyrus G14 from 2020 after getting annoyed with the former. Ironically, I killed the poor G14 last week when replacing a faulty fan, so I can’t run any tests for you. But let me tell you this: literally everything worked on Cachy KDE out of the box, including the fan options based on power settings, so I don’t even think dual booting is necessary. I can’t do anything more reassuring than to give you a vague ‘It gon be aight’ but I’ll just say you are making the right choice in switching.
EDIT: also the rolling disaster thing is more or less a meme. Months later nothing bad has happened. Just update weekly with Cachy update (reminders can be set weekly if you don’t want to think about it). I only once had to roll back and it was entirely due to my own meddling with some packages and yeah the snapshot system just werks.
That’s great to hear, thanks! I wanted to be 100% sure it worked on the actual hardware before committing after wasting so much time on Kubuntu and Nobara so I did the dual boot scenario and after some work my NVIDIA GPU finally actually suspends properly! So as long as I don’t break anything in the near future I’ll be erasing the Nobara partitions and going full Cachy from now on. I’m very thankful the community has been so helpful, that is enough to recommend it to me.
NVIDIA GPU finally actually suspends properly! So as long as I don’t break anything in the near future I’ll be erasing the Nobara partitions and going full Cachy from now on. 
I’m very thankful the community has been so helpful, that is enough to recommend it to me.