Concerning power consumption. As you already figured out, it's not an issue with Ubuntu, it's an issue with drivers and hardware compatibility. I too run an ASU

Concerning power consumption. As you already figured out, it's not an issue with Ubuntu, it's an issue with drivers and hardware compatibility. I too run an ASUS laptop, and initially I got very bad mileage. However, after some tweaks (enable a feature in the graphics driver, disable secondary graphics card, work-around buggy BIOS, etc) I got pretty much the promised 8 h.