ASUS ZenVision Laptop Lid Screen Reverse Engineered & Now Able To Work On Linux

ASUS ZenVision Laptop Lid Screen Reverse Engineered & Now Able To Work On Linux

https://www.phoronix.com/news/ASUS-ZenVision-Linux

Publish Date: 2026-06-02 06:12:00

Source Domain: www.phoronix.com

ASUS ZenVision is a feature of some ASUS laptops like the Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition where there is a 3.5-inch monochrome screen embedded into the top lid of the laptop. From this mini display embedded into the top lid of the laptop it’s possible to display animated themes, show the current date/time, battery status, or customized messages and the like. The practicality is rather limited as primarily it’s for showing off to people around you besides when your laptop lid is closed, but now with experimental code it’s now possible to use ZenVision on Linux.

Open-source developer Olivier Magnier managed to reverse engineer the ASUS ZenVision USB protocol via Ghidra on Windows with the official ASUS software. In turn he documented this proprietary ASUS protocol and created a user-space driver and app for ZenVision on Linux.

Via the open-source app you can load live applets onto this laptop lid screen and show off various visualization effects for actually making this ASUS laptop feature work under Linux.

This GitHub repository hosts the user-space driver for this 3.5-inch, 256×64 monochrome screen. This user-space driver is MIT licensed and written in Python.

There is then the ZenVision-Studio repository for the user-space app for loading custom animations and live applets. This too is MIT licensed for those with one of these ASUS Zenbook laptops sporting the ZenVision display.

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