I've had reliable boards from both. For me the USB of the Asus would make it win out, but that's me and having a buncha USB things going on but only one monitor.

Discrete GPU with desired ports?

Looking at the second part of the comparison there's really not anything to choose between the two. 

They've got a LAN port, surround sound jacks, wireless aerials and bluetooth. Unless you've got devices that can utilise the latest revision(s) of BT you won't see any discernible benefit of one over t'other. 
  Does the board not ship with drivers? Or is having physical media in the box a thing of the past these days? I last bought a mobo 10+ years ago and have been stalwartly upgrading and bastardising it over the years, but I'm sure it came with a driver disk. Still, you'd hope they'd at least release a download to coincide with the hardware launch :C

 

Not for linux.

Thanks all.

 

> Discrete GPU with desired ports?

It's not a question of desired ports, simply a preference to not get extra wires/adapters.

(Also, anything without noisy fans is liable to be a downgrade from the built-in Radeon.)

 

> Does the board not ship with drivers?

Many manufacturer's attitude to Linux-based OSes hasn't really changed in the past two decades, but even ignoring that aspect, the only universal media these days is USB drives.

(Heh, which makes me realise I'm going to want an SD reader for this machine.)

Thus, only Windows drivers are available for download, though at least the Gigabyte driver section does acknowledge its existence with: "Due to different Linux support condition provided by chipset vendors, please download Linux driver from chipset vendors' website or 3rd party website."

But yeah, it's basically down to when drivers are submitted to the kernel - anything too new might not have made it into an LTS release yet.