I used to have ASUS Laptop that had ExpressGate do any laptops exist that have this setup?

Posted by Th3JackofH3arts@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 10 comments

Asus was really ahead of its time with this. I had the Asus U52F laptop in 2009. ExpressGate kind of sucked, but having two power buttons in 2026 would be really cool. Does anything like this exist now?

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beefcat_@reddit

Cathode Ray Dude has a whole series about these things.

TLDR about why they went away:

The whole point was to boot faster than Windows, but they rarely saved you more than 10-15 seconds (and sometimes were actually slower!)
That 10-15 second time saving came with also not having access to all your software, so you needed to reboot as soon as you needed anything other than a web browser or basic email
Improvements in battery life and sleep reliability meant users mostly stopped turning their laptops all the way off when not in use

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ephemeralmiko@reddit

For those who (like me) have never heard of it:

ASUS Express Gate is technology developed by ASUS and introduced with their P5E3 series of motherboards. It uses Splashtop, a Linux environment that is integrated into the motherboard.

With this technology, users can turn on their computer and within five seconds, access the Internet using Firefox, online e-mail, Skype, and the Splashtop desktop. These programs and features are available while their operating system is still loading.

Actually sounds super handy for slow machines, but with how fast modern machines boot up, I doubt there'd be any incentive to add that as a feature. I don't know of any other machines that used this, and there's a decent chance that ASUS put a patent on it.

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SpeedDaemon1969@reddit

Back when storage was only spinning rust, I longed for a laptop with a basic OS in NVRAM, to use if Windoze broke down. More for me than the users, really. Now with NVMe, that's what every drive is. It would still be fun to have something like that in flash.

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Th3JackofH3arts@reddit (OP)

You're probably right about the patent. I know it's a pipe dream, but I think there's a niche market for designers/gamers/distro hoppers. The designers are stuck with Windows because we use Adobe, ArcGIS, or Autocad or someone who wants a desktop experience and Bazzite on the other.

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ephemeralmiko@reddit

Wouldn't those people just dual-boot their preferred distro, as opposed to whatever is preinstalled with Splashtop?

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Th3JackofH3arts@reddit (OP)

Maybe with Linux to Linux that's true, but I had a disaster with windows and grub. I would love to have two different systems that are isolated from each other. Press one button for Windows one for Linux.

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Infinity-of-Thoughts@reddit

I mean.. That just requires two separate storage drives.

I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu. Ubuntu is encrypted, so even if, theoretically, Windows reads my Ubuntu drive, it's encrypted, so it's all garbled.

And then I just hit the "boot"-button for boot, and choose between which to boot.

This would still 100% be doable with a single drive, I've just had several old boards with weird EFI implementations that fucked up with one EFI partition.

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beefcat_@reddit

Manufacturers have completely abandoned these things because they were very bad at their intended job.

The idea was to give users a faster way to boot their machine to do basic email and web browsing. The problem with all of these implementations is that they didn't boot that much faster than full Windows (sometimes they were actually slower), while also leaving the use without access to their apps and files. Meanwhile, battery life improved and sleep/hibernate features got more reliable so people just stopped turning their laptops off when not in use.

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HeligKo@reddit

The usefulness of that for the masses went away with Window Fast Startup and significantly faster hardware. It was a slick feature in it's day though.