With modern laptops, proper platform/WMI drivers are becoming more depended upon not only for supporting all typical functionality from keyboards to backlights and other handling, but also for achieving proper performance. For many laptop vendors, the Linux platform drivers are maintained by the open-source community and actual customers. The latest example of the challenges of the community-maintained support rather than from the vendor is with the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614PR gaming laptop seeing inappropriate power values set in the open-source driver that were incorrect and led to lower power/performance than Windows.

The ASUS Armoury driver for laptops and handhelds on Linux isn't maintained by ASUS at all but rather from the open-source community from Valve engineers to ASUS laptop owners wanting to enjoy their devices full-featured on Linux. A patch earlier this summer added support for the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614PR laptop to the ASUS Armoury driver as was needed for power profile handling and to allow custom fan curves as otherwise the gaming laptop on Linux saw "suboptimal performance or noise management." That patch creation was assisted by Gemini-3.5-Flash AI.

But it turns out that the power limit values were incorrect for this laptop and ended up being too low compared to how the laptop was programmed on Microsoft Windows. So a new patch now adjusts those values with the PL1 max limit going from 90W to 120W, the PL2 and PL3 default/max limits going from 110/125W to 140/145W.

So for anyone that happens to use the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614PR gaming laptop on Linux, this patch is now on the way to fix those power limits and the latest example of where it would be better if the actual hardware vendor was proactively maintaining their driver support on Linux especially as it pertains to device-specific data.

The ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614PR is a 16-inch gaming laptop released in 2025 with an AMD Ryzen 9 processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 graphics, 165Hz display, and Windows 11 by default. With pricing close to $3,000 USD on this gaming laptop, leaving any performance left behind is unfortunate.