Have been keeping half an eye on framework laptops as a potential next daily driver as and when I’m ready for one.
Just wondering what people’s experience of using them on linux has been, particularly nixos
I’m assuming all the drivers are in the kernel given the way the company is
Have been using a 2016 thinkpad for the past year or so and have had a decent experience with it, with the way lenovo have gone with their newer thinkpads it seems like framework is now the best for maintainability/upgradability
(not planning to upgrade in the immediate future as this machine is doing fine, but frameworks are a strong contender in my mind right now and I’m curious as to people’s experience)
My brother has a Framework 13 and mainly uses a combination of NixOS and Windows. Most of the time he uses NixOS, but sometimes the software he needs is broken on Nix. When that happens, he reverts to a previous version of Nix or he boots onto Windows. He has Windows installed in one of the external-drive socket thingies that he keeps plugged in at all times in case he needs Windows.
Apart from the occasional broken Nix package, he has had issues with the hyper-sensitive two-finger scrolling in Gnome (which I would say is not directly a Framework or Nix problem). Also, a while back, when I bought the computer with him, we bought Oloy RAM because it was fast and cheap, but that lead to weird crashes. Framework support helped us test the sticks and eventually we sold those sticks and got the Framework-tested Crucial sticks, which solved the problem. Finally, I remember he had to be careful about not just closing the laptop but actually clicking “sleep” and then closing it, because otherwise it would get super hot and lose a lot of battery.
Despite these struggles, he recently told my Mac-loving girlfriend that he will not get a “disposable” computer. I take this to mean he will keep using his Framework laptop.
I imagine the broken packages thing are less about the framework itself, he’s probably using discord or other electron stuff right?
I’ve found when an electron package gets marked as insecure it takes everyone a while to update to the secure one
The clicking sleep thing is interesting one but at the moment I’m doing something very similar anyway
Kubuntu on Framework 16 AMD 7000 series here. Sleep is horrible - definitely drains your battery. Bag heats up, and I estimate maybe a 1% drain per hour. I’ve enabled hibernate though I rarely use it.
Battery is alright but not great. I get maybe 2-3 hours of active, light use from full battery.
No compatibility issues that I’ve noticed, though, of course, Linux has its fair share of minor non-hardware-related bugs.
Camera is serviceable but not amazing. Not sure about microphone but I assume the same thing. Speakers are somewhat odd in that the speakers are pointed to the side rather than toward the front, but again - serviceable.
Have you tried it much without the GPU? I imagine that would cut down battery usage by a lot right?
Camera mic and speakers are not a deal-breaker especially as they’re upgradable from what I understand
Yes, I don’t use the external GPU. I just use the AMD APU. Also I realized that AMD 7000 could refer to both the cpu and the GPU. Ah, AMD and their marketing
Hmmm 3 hours battery is definitely a major downside, given it charges off usb c less of an issue but still
Was actually considering getting one of those copilot pcs once the Linux support catches up, supposedly people are charging those things once a week or so
My understanding is that Arm chips don’t have any fundamental advantage over x86 chips. They’re more efficient simply because they’ve been optimized to be more efficient for so long. I’ve heard that upcoming Intel and AMD chips could be able to compete with the new Arm cpu’s, so if you’re not going to get a new laptop soon, it seems worthwhile to just wait and see
Not planning to give up on the trusty ThinkPad soon anyway
So far the evidence I’ve seen has been overwhelmingly that arm chips are way more power efficient
People say it makes no difference but I’ve yet to see an x86 device come close to the arm ones battery wise, seems like a strange coincidence
Yes, but that’s my point, you see. Because Arm historically has been used for mobile and small devices, there’s been a strong incentive for decades to emphasize power efficiency. Because x86 historically has been used for desktops, there’s been a strong incentive to emphasize power. It’s only been very recently that Arm attempted to have comparable power, and even more recently that x86 attempted to have comparable power efficiency.
Sure, Arm is currently more efficient, but the general consensus is that there’s no inherent reason for why Arm must be more efficient than x86. In other words, the only reason it is more efficient is just because they’ve been focusing on efficiency for longer.
Both AMD and Intel’s current gen x86 cpu’s are, from what I can tell, basically spitting distance away from Qualcomm’s Arm cpu’s in terms of battery life, and rumor has it that both x86 companies should be able to match Arm chips in efficiency by next gen.
So if efficiency is a priority for you, I think it’s worthwhile to wait and see what the cpu companies cook up in the next couple of years, especially as both AMD and Intel seem to be heavily focused on maximizing efficiency right now
Interesting, is the CPU upgradeable on the framework? Could be nice to replace that later down the line when those come out
Just tested with normal power profile and screen brightness turned down - battery went down by about 50% after 3 hours. I think my laptop usually dies after 3 hours because I have the screen brightness up
What’s the brightness like and in what country if you don’t mind me asking?
Tend to have my current laptop on full brightness all the time otherwise I can’t see anything, and I live in a generally pretty dark country
I mainly do work indoors, so the brightness does not really matter that much to me. But as far as I can tell, the brightness is pretty normal for laptops - I don’t think it’s any brighter or dimmer than other laptops I’ve used in the past. According to this website that I found, brightness is 25 to 486 nits. Google search seems to say that average maximum brightness for laptops is somewhere around 300-400 nits.
My understanding is that the screen is generally what eats up most of the battery on device, so if you plan to have brightness turned up, it might be difficult to find a laptop with a long battery life.
I’ve got a 16 without dGPU currently. Running Fedora Silverblue after a bad experience trying out NixOS. Battery life could be better but, it’s been pretty awesome and flawless so far. I’ve barely started my tinkering on it since I have a ton of other projects but, I’m really enjoying it and do recommend.
Ouch if nixos doesn’t work well that’s a deal-breaker, what were the issues and how long ago? Other people seem to have had decent experiences with it
Oh. The problem wasn’t the hardware. Don’t let my experience dissuade you, especially if you already know and like NixOS. It was the NixOS docs and my unfamiliarity with Nix/NixOS. Following the official docs gave me an install that worked perfectly but had no networking. I might give it another go once the docs are more mature but the experience and need of a DSL left a bad taste in my mouth.
Ahh I see ok makes more sense
Already got thousands of lines of nix config so not about to hop distro lol
Yeah. You shouldn’t have an issue then - all of the nix stuff worked as it was supposed. Really a documentation problem more than anything.
11th gen Intel Framework 13 and using Pop_OS. I have many USB related annoyances. For example, when I’m using their USB-A expansion cards that they state support USB 3.2 Gen 2 I am unable to get more than 30MB/s. If I use the same device but through a USB-A to USB-C adapter and a USB-C expansion card I see 500-800MB/s.
I also have some weird issue where USB devices sometimes just don’t show up when plugged in, or if I boot with them plugged in. Re-inserting the device usually fixes it. I was assuming it might have been a hardware problem at first, but it happens on every port regardless of what device it is regardless of if it’s through a USB-A or USB-C card. Not sure what’s going on or how to really go about debugging issues like this.
Sounds like some kind of hardware fault, have you got in touch with them about it?
I don’t really care about usb transfer speeds, that random disconnecting sounds like an issue though.
To clarify it doesn’t get disconnected. It just periodically doesn’t recognize that a storage device got plugged in or, alternatively, that there was one plugged in at the time that the laptop was powered on.
But no, I haven’t contacted them about it yet. I need to first check if there’s any dmesg/journalctl events happening that might be worth following up on before contacting support. Primarily because I don’t recall having any issues like that when I had Windows installed so I’m not convinced yet that it is a hardware fault.
I’m running Fedora on my Framework 13 - works great, no issues. I have only had it open to install the RAM so far, but it appears to be as upgradeable and repairable as advertised. Looks great, feels premium, nice and light. Not great battery life is my only complaint, but there are larger batteries available for the 13 since I bought mine.
Ooh battery upgrades are a good sign, what kinda battery life do you get now with an unupgraded one?
I haven’t evaluated it properly in a while but I’m pretty sure it was under 8 hours with the CPU throttled and the screen brightness low. I am usually just writing or coding on it, nothing too intensive.
Ooooh very promising
What’ve you got it throttled to?
I mean I use it in power saver mode. It goes as low as 400MHz but it’s not fixed at that. 12th gen i7 btw.
Is this on Linux or Windows?
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Just got a framework 13. Flawless on Fedora.
Fantastic, how long have you had it for out of curiosity since you said you got it recently? I’m also wondering as to the longevity of these laptops
My batch shipped a month or so ago. But the other posts in your thread kinda give you an idea of longevity. Seems like someone else has one from the first batch and it’s still going.
I have a 12th gen Intel Framework running Arch. I love it, although as others have pointed out the battery life could be better. Early kernels shortly after release had some incompatibility issues that required specific kernel arguments to fix. Also I had to blacklist the light sensor as it conflicted with the brightness function keys.
The Arch wiki has a page with details on Framework laptops you may appreciate looking at.
How long would you say a charge normally lasts, apologies for the profiling but I’m assuming you tend to work at a terminal more if on arch rather than loads of heavy electron apps?
That’s hard for me to answer because I’m usually at home plugged in, and I set the max charge in the bios to only 65% so the battery will physically degrade slower (I don’t need the charge). A few hours is really all I can say with any accuracy. Worth noting a few things -
- Since I bought my laptop they came out with an improved battery I could upgrade to, so you’d get a better experience.
- I believe(?) battery life is improved a fair bit at least with the AMD ones; less sure on the newer Intel ones.
I will say that if long battery life is your #1 concern this may not be the laptop for you.
Not number one concern but I need it to survive long enough that I’m not just permanently plugging in everywhere I go
Not as bad if it’s usb c charge I’ll have to check that
I have a 11th gen Intel Framework 13 running PopOS.
Everything is fine except the
bugfeature with the rechargeable CHMOS battery. On my model it only charges when the laptop is charging. (They changed that behavior in all later model afaik)Since I use my laptop only sporadically I can’t just pick it up and use it right away because that battery is always empty. When it’s empty the power button doesn’t work even when the main battery is fully charged.
What exactly is a CMOS battery?
It’s a coin-cell battery. Traditionally it was used to keep the memory that stores the bios-settings and the real-time-clock powered when the PC was turned off.
By now the bios settings are stored ona different kind of memory, so it doesn’t need power when turned off.
But the rtc still needs power when the laptop is off as well as other stuff (for example the circuitry that makes the power-button work)
In the framework it’s also rechargeable, so you can’t just swap it for a cheap one from the store once it runs out.
I mean that seems like a better way to do it, I’m assuming these things last for years by the fact I’ve never had to replace one or even know about it
How is it only charging when plugged in an issue if it lasts longer than the laptop’s own battery
I guess if you don’t use it for long enough it depletes while powered off
The battery lasts about a mont in that laptop and gets worse quickly over time when not regularly charged.
I’m not sure if the short runtime is caused by the design-decision of using a rechargeable battery or a big power-draw from it.
For me this is also the first laptop that ever had an issue like that. Even my decade old thinkpad is still on its first CMOS battery.
If you’re comfortable soldering I believe they do offer a free CMOS battery substitution module to help with what you’re describing: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/RTC+Battery+Substitution+on+11th+Gen+Intel®+Core™/203
You probably have enough responses by now, but I have a 12th gen intel 13 running Bluefin, previously PopOS. I love it and haven’t had any problems with it. I once had to reset the main board by disconnection the batteries (both main and RTC) and it was a super simple process following their guide. The fan does get loud but I’ve only encountered that when I’m on Foundry or if I try to play a more modern game, but it doesn’t bother me.
What’s foundry?
Also, so using the thing normally the fans don’t spin up a lot? How about if doing a build or something else that uses 100% CPU?
It’s a program for running/playing ttrpgs (think d&d remotely). And I don’t think they’ve ever spun up without me trying to do something graphically intensive. But I also doing do builds so our cases might not overlap much.
If it doesn’t spin up at max CPU usage then builds won’t be a problem. I suppose ai might make it spin up but I’m not exactly doing that stuff every day anyway
Actually, yeah I forgot about AI. I play with that a little, and it definitely spins up for that. Framework did just put a video out about running AI on their 16" with modular graphics card. But integrated on the 13" is definitely a push.
FW 16 on Ubuntu LTS has worked flawlessly for me except the battery drain on sleep is really bad (20% per 24 hours). No crashes or freezes or resume from sleep failures as I’ve experienced on other laptops with no vendor support.
Does the same apply for hibernation? My current behavior is to hibernate my machine manually before shutting the lid anyway so I don’t think that would bother me too much (though it would be nice to have a machine that will suspend properly)
I’m currently using LUKS full disk encryption which can complicate hibernation. There are some community instructions here https://community.frame.work/t/guide-framework-16-hibernate-w-swapfile-setup-on-fedora-40/53080
I just found if you install Debian 12 and make the LVM swap partition the size of RAM, you can finally enable hibernate to encrypted swap without craziness during install. It was a breath of fresh air.
Are you using LUKS full disk encryption? From my experience, LUKS complicates hibernation.
Yup. LUKS with LVM from the installer. Guided partitioning did try to set swap to 1GB, so I deleted both logical volumes (root and swap) in the guided installer to make swap 16GB. After install it was just like a non-LUKS setup, only having to set RESUME. It was very refreshing consider previous hoops I’ve jumped through.
Have 16, FedoraKDE not nixOS though, no problems to report in my sector.
No issues with battery life or fan noise? That’s what I’m hearing from others
No fan noise, battery could be better but could be worse, but no external GPU which probably exacerbates both.
I’m not planning on getting the GPU anyway, most of my work is done from a terminal and a browser in a lightweight window manager, as long as the integrated graphics can handle that it’ll be fine
Oh for sure, it can handle 2160p video on the integrated, and a terminal and browser (with 16gb ram anyway), no problem. It’ll stutter a bit if I am file transferring with all that though.
Sleep kind of sucks on the original 11th gen hardware. They pushed out a bios update that broke S3 sleep, so now all you’ve got is the s2idle version, which the kernel is only OK at. Your laptop bag might heat up. S3 breaking isn’t really their fault, Intel deprecated it. Still annoying though. I’ve heard the Chromebook version and other newer gens have better sleep support.
Other than that, it’s great. NixOS runs just fine, even the fingerprint reader works, which has been rare for Linux
Is that the case for the AMD boards as well?
Couldn’t tell you unfortunately. It looks like AMD is also on board with deprecating S3 sleep, so I would guess that it’s not significantly better. The kernel controls the newer standby modes, so it’s really going to depend on how well it’s supported there.
Do you know how to make the fingerprint reader work on my newly purchased Carbon X1 Gen 6 with Ubuntu on it? I’ve gone to great lengths to make it work but still haven’t found a solution
Not in general, sorry. Best bet is to make sure you’re using the most recent kernel, which Ubuntu tends to lag on. You can also try checking out the arch wiki entry for it. It’s a different distro, but the wiki is good and commonly has tips relevant for any distro.
Thank you!
I can live with that, my thinkpad won’t sleep properly at the moment anyway (I’ve taken to just running systemctl hibernate before closing the lid, I should probably set that to the default behaviour instead of suspend at some point)
you should enable
suspend-then-hibernateinstead. laptop suspends normally and if not woken in, say, an hour, the RTC hibernates it to disk.Doesn’t work, I’ve already spent ages trying to get this to work properly and have basically just given up at this point.
I don’t mind waiting for it to recover from hibernation, I only hibernate it once or twice a day anyway
not to trample on your experiences, but you can make it work. it’s true it’s super cumbersome and involved though.
I’ve had/got it working on a T420s, T480s, T14, MBPr 2012, on debian, fedora, and arch. it helps if it’s not your primary/only workstation so you can tweak it without pressure. keep at it, it’s worth it, I can’t imagine using my laptops any other way.
maybe do I write-up one of these days.
I’m not doubting it’s possible but with the combination of my hardware and the fact I’m on nixos it proved to be too much trial and error, too many options to try and too much time to iterate as I needed to reboot every time it didn’t work
Pretty much all my sleep/suspend issues with Linux went away when I switched to Manjaro from Fedora on my 11th gen Framework 13. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but the majority of the time I can open my laptop after a couple days and still have most of my battery.
What kernel are you running? From what I understand, that should be the major differentiator if you’re not using S3.
I’ve been running KDE-debian for 1.5 years on my amd framework with no issues (fingerprint sensor worked after installing some software). Can’t say anything for nixos though.
Fantastic, no issues with sleep or anything? Everyone else seems to say the sleep mode battery drain is huge
(planning to do sleep then hibernate anyway, or maybe just hibernate and not even bother with sleep)
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I just learned about the fans, and my plans to get a framework next time tanked.
Do you know if the fans are particularly loud? Something I love about my ThinkPad is that it’s basically silent
I’ve heard people complain, but mine are so quiet I thought they weren’t spinning. I think the difference is the external GPU, which I do not have.
Ah interesting, I was considering not bothering with the GPU as I only plan to use the thing for work anyway
What’s the battery life like without, I heard from someone else 3 or 4 hours of normal usage but unsure if that’s with or without
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I meant the framework, but fair enough
Supposedly the newer macs were quite good at heat dissipation, was that iBullshit?
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