Asus Zephyrus G15

> the keyboard is mushy and the left ctrl key randomly stopped working 2021 G15 (GA503QM), 3⅓ years old: the keyboard is a little less mushy than other laptops I’ve had by a similar age—HP 6710b, some Clevo thing (its keyboard was atrocious in well under two years, with Space and A particularly badly functionally affected too), and Surface Book. Left Arrow key become unreliable earlier this year, requiring significant extra pressure sometimes, or already pressing down another key (e.g. press LCtrl at the same time and it was completely fine , which is telling of the nature of the fault), and now almost never works. E has also been just a tiny bit unreliable at times, as far as its activation point is concerned, but all of my keyboards have had at least one or two issues like that within three years. For reference, I use my laptops extremely heavily (often been >10h and I don’t know how many thousand words per day), and don’t take the greatest care of them either, though significantly better than some people I’ve seen. I have little doubt I’d be in the top 0.01% for laptop keyboard wear.

I would say if your laptop starts doing sudden thermal shutdowns then liquid metal should be your first suspect. However, I do have a slightly older all-amd variant (G513QY) which may behave differently. Comparing my case with the article, they noticed CPU throttling and had dark/black marks on the CPU, whereas I was encountering GPU thermal shutdowns with marks on both GPU and CPU. Rough timeline for my laptop was: 14 months in, manually under-clocked discrete GPU to prevent thermal shutdowns 20 months in, complete cooling failure on GPU, replaced liquid metal with PTM7950

I had a 5900HS/3080Ti version of the G15, and probably the most underwhelming parts were the screen, which was on the dim side, its heat/noise output, and how you wouldn't get the full potential of the GPU unless you were running outdated, ASUS-specific Nvidia drivers which Windows constantly wanted to update. The white exterior looked cool, but the paint they used for it was so fragile that gently removing one of the factory demo stickers pulled a bit of it off. It was frustrating, because I really wanted to like it. That laptop got returned towards the end of its return window and replaced with a combination of a ThinkPad Nano and custom built gaming desktop, which have both served me far better for their respective uses.

It's not. You can go and pick up any computer that is currently on the market, doesn't matter if it's 300 or 3000 dollars as long as it is a (n IBM) PC and it will run Windows. Will it always be flawless? No. Will it always work perfectly out of the box? No. But it will work and generally you have a good chance of it working as you wish assuming you are fine with Windows and what MS does with it. I bought an Asus Zephyrus G15 (2022) specifically because it was recommended to me because it is supposed to be great for Linux and it's probably the worst Linux experience I have ever had. As the first piece of hardware that I specifically picked for Linux support. Because most DEs don't do fractional scaling but all high end laptops have too much DPI to not have fractional scaling. Nvidia is still not providing proper Linux drivers. Asus can't program to save their lives but the tools that replace the Asus stuff on Windows are still better than the stuff that is replacing the Asus stuff on Linux (asusctl/ supergfxctl vs G-Helper). I once had a machine where the nvme drive was simply not working. That was when Kernel 5 came out. It broke on Fedora but worked in Mint until Mint got Kernel 5. During my last Linux adventure, KDE just died when using WhatsApp as a PWA (where I live, WhatsApp is essential software to have a social life). And even after years of Wayland being around, it's still impossible to have apps that aren't blurry in most DEs because X11 is still around. You're comp…

Try to find parts for an ASUS or an MSI gaming laptop; the real killer is you have to search using both model numbers to be accurate. Multiple graphics card configurations per model makes it even harder. Sometimes, AliExpress is the only way and the motherboard still costs $525+.