A Tablet’s Midlife Crisis: Installing Linux on an ASUS T100TA

Photo of a tablet, in portrait orientation, attached to the wall underneath a cabinet, showing the King Arthur Baking website. It's plugged into the outlet to the right and we can see baking containers to the left.

Quick Overview

I have an ASUS T100TA1 tablet (technically, a convertible laptop) that I wanted to install Linux on. Here’s the quick overview of what ended up working for me:

  1. On another computer running Linux, I installed Ventoy on a USB drive
  2. Downloaded a Debian image (debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso)
  3. Followed Ventoy’s instructions to copy the Debian image to the USB drive
  4. On the tablet, booted up Windows and disabled Fast Startup
  5. Shutdown the tablet completely
  6. Plugged in the USB drive
  7. Pressed, and held down, the F2 key while turning the computer back on to get into the Setup Utility
  8. Changed to the Boot screen and, for Boot Option #1, chose the USB drive
  9. For Boot Option #2, chose to disable
  10. Went to the Security menu and disabled Secure Boot
  11. Chose to Save and Exit and then restarted the computer
  12. The Ventoy menu popped up and I chose the Debian ISO
  13. For the most part, I just accepted the default install options
  14. When asked about the desktop environment, I chose GNOME
  15. When prompted, I rebooted and everything just worked

Background

Back in 2014 I bought an ASUS T100TA tablet with Windows 8. I used the tablet for several years. However, while its storage was vastly superior to the 16 GB iPad we owned, the battery life was much worse. At some point, the battery died completely. The tablet got stuffed in a box and moved from house-to-house for several years until 2020.

In 2010 I bought an all-in-one computer for the kitchen and mounted it to the kitchen wall. All of our family recipes, from both sides of the family, are on the computer so it was useful to have a dedicated computer to view the recipes without running the risk of spilling liquid on my regular laptop. It worked really well and I used that computer in the kitchen for 10 years. In 2020 we moved to a rental and I couldn’t mount the computer to the wall. Also, there wasn’t enough counter space for it to sit on the counter. Eventually, I remembered the old ASUS tablet and decided to give it a try. I attached it to the wall, positioned vertically, with 3M strips, plugged it into the wall, and it worked fantastically. I’ve been using the tablet as my kitchen computer ever since.

At some point, I installed Windows 10 on the computer. This tablet was obviously not made to work with Windows 10. However, it worked well enough to pull up recipe websites which was all I needed. This worked well until Microsoft announced it was going to end standard security updates on October 14, 2025. I heard the announcement a while back but just didn’t want to deal with it. There was no way this tablet could run Windows 11 and, given some features unique to tablet-like devices, I wasn’t sure how well it would be supported on Linux. So I just ignored the problem until I couldn’t anymore.

In October, I decided I shouldn’t ignore the Windows 10 problem any longer. Mastodon is famous/notorious for its passionate Linux advocates so I felt it was a reasonable starting place to ask for advice. Mastodon did not disappoint. I got a variety of useful suggestions. I also Googled my specific model to see any success stories or cautionary tales. I was surprised by the number of results I got. Apparently it was a much more popular tablet than I realized. Long story short, I was able to install Linux on my tablet.

More Details

My initial concern was whether or not Linux would have compatible drivers for things like the touch screen and WiFi. It turns out, I was worried about the wrong things. The biggest problem was that I had a 64-bit processor and a 32-bit UEFI (what runs when the computer first turns on)2. As one of the Mastodon response warned, many Linux distributions dropped support for 32-bit systems. The internet provides a number of ways to work around this limitation. Though, it seems like everyone has to do something slightly different from everyone else to make it work.

The Linux Distribution

Both Mastodon users and Google results suggested a number of interesting sounding Linux distros. Several of them had guides specifically for my device. Eventually, I settled on Debian (the Trixie release). I found this Reddit thread, which sounded promising. However, what really won me over was the wiki page for the T100TA (technically for the Bookworm release but I hoped Trixie would be similar). I really liked the “Overall Status” section with the check marks. It included feature I forgot about but are really important for me, such as the rotating screen ability. Plus, to be honest, there was a bit of nostalgia at play.

I read the manual which was quite good. The only area I had trouble was their instructions for preparing the USB stick. My computer just wouldn’t boot it. Which, wasn’t surprising given the UEFI issue. If I had been trying to create the USB drive via Windows, I probably would have tried using Rufus, per the Linux Mint tutorial. However, after a bit of searching around, I ran across someone who recommended Ventoy and that worked beautifully3. A little to my surprise, I didn’t have to do anything else other than copying the Debian image file.

Debian Desktop Environment

I initially chose GNOME for my desktop environment because the wiki for my device listed GNOME as one of the options where the screen rotation should just work. However, I really wanted desktop shortcuts and it looks like this is not something GNOME supports anymore (?) so I decided to try a couple of other options. That was a mistake. I tried both Plasma (KDE) and Xfce and either the rotation didn’t work right or the virtual keyboard didn’t work right. No doubt this is something that could have eventually been corrected. However, it felt silly to spend a significant amount of time on it when GNOME had worked fine the first time.

Tweaks

  • I disabled hibernation – the documentation stated hibernation didn’t work well, which I confirmed, and this tablet is always plugged into power
  • It seems like vim wasn’t installed, so I installed it
  • When used as a tablet, the T100TA width is pretty narrow but Firefox’s user agent just reports a standard computer. This means that half of my screen may be taken up by side menus. To fix this, I changed the default user agent to report that it’s a phone, not a computer. (Tablet probably would have worked fine too but phone is the first one I tried and, at least for now, seems to work fine.)

Useful or Interesting Websites

  1. Specifically, T100TA-C2-GR. ↩
  2. As an aside, this is an interesting article about the 32-bit UEFI/64-bit processor combo. ↩
  3. I used the “For Linux – CLI mode” method. ↩