Asus ROG Strix GL702ZC - inconsistent touchpad and kbd backlight issues

English Hardware
1

Hi all,
I’ve just bought an Asus ROG and installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on it. Touchpad, special keys and kbd backlight worked out of the box. The only annoyance was that I had to increase screen lightning after each reboot.
Sometime during setting up the rest of needed apps (dev and virtualization tools) and KDE configuration to my liking I noticed the screen lighting issue dissapeared - along with the touchpad and kbd backlight. After a couple more restarts - the touchpad started working again but the backlight problem remained.
I was using an external mouse and keyboard that’s why I cannot pinpoint the moment when the touchpad stopped working (KDE said it could not find any touchpad)

kernel: 4.17.4
details: https://pastebin.com/h1Aajuuk

Thank you.

2

The output you’ve shared doesn’t suggest any obvious issues. Do you have KDE configured to disable the touchpad when the mouse is plugged in, or was it disabled via the keyboard function key perhaps?

3

Tumbleweed is pretty erratic on this laptop.
After one upgrade, touchpad stops working, next update touchpad starts working. I get low-res boot menu sometimes. Sometimes it asks me LUKS password for each partition. Sometimes it stays a lot at the infinity-sign screen. Or might show me the terminal to log in and reboot or start normally.
Keyboard lightning is still not working (at least this is consistent).

4

For the keyboard backlight there is a bug report open 1107641 – No keyboard backlit on Asus UX410UA with kernel 4.18
Please see also No keyboard backlit on kernel 4.18 - Hardware - openSUSE Forums

5

Thanks for the links - they’re pretty informative.

I’ve added the acpi_osi=Linux param to the bootloader but it’s useless. Seems like I’m missing something Asus-related:

devrog:~ # cd /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi/leds/asus::kbd_backlight
-bash: cd: /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi/leds/asus::kbd_backlight: No such file or directory
devrog:~ # systemctl stop backlight@leds:asus::kbd_backlight.service
Failed to stop backlight@leds:asus::kbd_backlight.service: Unit backlight@leds:asus::kbd_backlight.service not loaded.

For some reason the keyboard is no longer using the romanian layout. I have rechecked and redone all language settings in YaST but I still have the US international layout. It’s soo annoying, especially since I want to translate a plasma widget to romanian.
I’m using an external keyboard but that should not count (the ROG keyboard has the same layout - US International instead of romanian).

Thanks.