also, for the convenience of future visitors to this thread:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobara_Linux

@rolfie, indeed there is a failure of Ventoy as of at least the version we recently obtained.
(sha1 checksum 30bdd6023d81ea09ec5b19f5924ec92c56f96538  ventoy-1.0.99-linux.tar.gz)

more for future visitors: note, the above referenced "broken" version of Ventoy did work for a temporary installation of windows 11 as per our previous post in this thread. (but did not work for a variety of other operating systems)

as always, your mileage may vary, but good luck in any case.

instead of installing windows, i created a small partition and installed nobara linux  (contains systemd, ugh) as dual boot since this distribution includes the asusctl program in its repository. after installing and adjusting the settings, i am now able to boot devuan comfortably with the correct amd gpu configuration (hybrid).

after setting up asusctl in that distribution, i haven't used it since, no need.
only devuan for my needs.

by the way, i tried to use ventoy (was able to install nobara like this), but the laptop refused to install devuan using the ventoy method; after reading, there's some sort of incompatibility with devuan as well as with some other distributions. I read in the ventoy forums users reporting this situation.

i had to 'burn' a normal bootable usb stick with balena etcher, only with devuan in it, and then it worked right away.
have a great day!!

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11

also this article may provide some additional helpful information:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/how-to-upgrade-to-windows-11-whether-your-pc-is-supported-or-not/

we needed ventoy assistance to get our older equipment to function and their latest version has the necessary bypasses:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ventoy/

I received the new laptop just a few days ago but only opened it recently (too busy). So far, I inspected the bios and already disabled secure boot and the internal amd sag/mux gpu system (after reading several linux forums, this setting breaks suspend & hibernate in the laptop as well as the stock wifi card, which i replaced right away with intel ax210). There's no windows in it. disk is empty.

According to further reading, I had to first set up the amd gpu to hybrid in windows so i could save battery power in linux later; once this was set, then you forget about it. however, there was no windows installed to do this task.

After investigating, I found these 2 utilities that may be helpful. They say they need systemd to operate, yet after inspection, you only need systemd to start the service as far as i can see; all other steps are normal steps when installing from source/git.

How can i start the service manually without using systemd?
Please view the links below, they show how to manually install in debian, however, only the systemd part is the tricky one.

** https://gitlab.com/asus-linux/supergfxctl
** https://gitlab.com/asus-linux/asusctl

Thank you very much for your help again.
have a great day!!