I'm happy to help answer questions folks have on the product.
We (without intending to) ended up being among the first to ship a Ryzen 7040 U-series laptop, which means Linux support is early and depends on having the right kernel version. As others have noted in the comments, we were in a similar place when we were one of the earlier ones on both 12th Gen Intel Core and 13th Gen Intel Core, and both matured rapidly.
AMD continues to improve things with each release, and we've sent hardware to folks at Canonical for Ubuntu and Red Hat for Fedora to help speed along the process of having the out of the box experience with popular distros be smooth.
How was the experience from not being acknowledge by AMD, because you were not big enough, to going to be the first once shipping their new flagship laptop CPU after all their other customers moved their timeline out? I imagine their willingness to support you did increase in the last few months?
Eagerly awaiting my batch to ship. Very happy that I see a great team being in charge of this product.
Also thanks for being proactive in supporting the Linux community.
So one of the major things holding me of buying a framework is the screen. There have been sounds in the community asking for an upgraded screen option (500+ nits/HDR, 120hz, higher res etc) for years. Is this just something you guy aren't interested in at all? Or is it too hard sourcing panels, or even sourcing panels that fit the framework case?
Thanks for taking the time to appear here, give in depth answers, and still be a human face on the company.
My non-technical wife's laptop is needing replacement. I was going to buy a second hand thinkpad, but if enough stars align, a framework might be a good option.
Reluctantly bought a MacBook Air few days back, literally trying to somehow use my too old last MacBook Air while I waited/hope for something like a Framework laptop. But then I eventually realised that being in a third world country means the enthusiast initiatives would never reach you in time and when they do they’d probably be obsolete, out of practical use and irrelevant for various reasons. Maybe that’s one of the reasons for not focusing on such markets.
I’ve seen multiple other forum users unable to update fingerprint sensors in Linux with the same problem I had.
Also I’ve seen threads asking why Ubuntu freezes and if anyone else is having problems.
You guys explained in 1 forum post that amd is working on a fix for the second issue, and nobody has really mentioned the fwupd freezes some of us run into.
It’s just one more example of stuff in too many places. The official Ubuntu install guide doesn’t mention a new fix is coming to fix freezes and the place that does is a forum post that many people may miss.
Need 1 hub page for each device with some sort of stream of updates.
I have to bookmark the bios guide page to find out if new ones are out, a forum post to see if there is new changes with Ubuntu, stuff is a little far apart and manual process to find updates.
Curious as to what the second vent on the right of the chassis is for? A second fan placement? Just a passing curiosity as I noticed it when assembling!
I wonder what kind of battery-life Framework users get?
I've recently gotten an Elitebook 845 G10 which runs on a Ryzen 7 Pro 7840HS, and battery life was at first shit. The issue was with the BIOS being bugged and not allowing ASPM. After manually activating, I now get around 12-15 hours on a 50Wh battery, depending on use of course. Results still preliminary though, more testing needs to be done.
Btw, I chose the Elitebook because it actually features great repairability. Pretty much everything can be swapped out, including memory. I was reluctant to buy HP, mostly due to the reputation they earned with their printer business shenanigans, but so far don't regret the purchase at all. In fact I like this device more and more.
Pretty much everything worked out of the box with ArchLinux, except for ASPM, which I was able to fix within a couple hours.
edit: Oh and the main motivation behind preferring the Elitebook over the Framework was the price. I mean really? Upgrade to 7840 almost 400 Euro? Lenovo charges like 80 Euro for that. For 1200 Euro I got the aforementioned CPU with a beautiful 120hz, 500nits, 2560x1600 screen, 2x16GB 5600 DDR5 SO-DIMM, 1TB NVME, etc. But it was a student offer.
I have the 845 g9, and I'm lukewarm about it. It's more to do with AMD than HP, but HP also has a few annoyances.
- No insert key
- No external display before OS. Can't do luks password over external monitor.
- Miscellaneous AMD bugs: vp9 hw decoding broken, s2idle sleep fails occasionally, gets stuck in lowest frequency sometimes, several others that have slowly been fixed on mainline
- Battery life is pretty mediocre. 5-6 hours of browsing, 2-3 hours of video.
I've got the 13th gen intel model so can't talk about amd battery life but I can get at least 4 hours out of the battery most of the time and for me that's good since I tend to be running between 1 and 4 vms constantly humming away using cpu cycles. I have played with tlp and bet if I lightened my load and capped the cpu I'd be able to get 6 to 8 hours without an issue but I bought the thing for the speed so I'll stick with it zooming along instead of a long battery life.
I have the 845 G8 and can echo most of your sentiment. It's a fast, well made and easily repairable/upgradable machine (ie. no soldered RAM modules).
However, HP's software is less than stellar. What annoys me the most is the fact that the latest BIOS update completely broke USB-C dock and monitor detection.
> The only real knock I can give framework on all of this, is having so many fixes in so many places.
This. By now, I have set up and maintained enough installations of diverse open / hobbyist products (e.g. Debian, Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant, Mixxx, Jellybean, Nextcloud... ) to come to the conclusion that an unorganized, unmaintained, laissez-fair user community democrized potpourri of "knowledge bases" quickly becomes a huge issue.
It sucks to have to hunt around a multitude of issue trackers, wikis, discussion forums, mailing list archives, Gitlab pages, web sites etc. to find solutions.
Sometimes, it is comment #297 in some paginated forum thread that helped, as previous nonworking answers in the same thread related to another software release version, using and referencing a different setup implicitly referencing comment #246 a couple of pages before.
I've had my Framework 12 over a year now, so maybe I can give some perspective. I had a lot of similar issues (mostly with wifi) running Fedora when I first got it. I also felt like I wasted a lot of time getting it set up and fixing little bugs here and there.
But I'm happy to say that after the first two weeks or so, it's been rock solid. The issues I had with wifi were patched pretty quickly, and everything else pretty much just works with the default configuration. The only thing is the battery life is still bad, partly because I have way too much RAM...
I’m looking forward to solutions with Linux that are vertically integrated. I know System76 is moving in this direction, but Apple will remain the king in this area in the near future.
Without vertical integration it’s a mess, no party wants to control the end to end experience and take responsibility.
Running Ubuntu 22.04.1 on a very recent device is not something I would recommend.
And it is particularly bad timing. 23.10 was released yesterday, so a new kernel should roll into 22.04 soon. It would also fix most of the software complaints if the auther would have used 23.10.
Please save yourself from the hassle of compiling a kernel, especially for Ubuntu (the userspace _expects_ Ubuntu patches, e.g. for apparmor). Pick a distro with a recent release, and for Ubuntu in particular check if you can live with 2 upgrades a year until you reach the next LTS (April of even years, so right now the _next_ upgrade. Worst case is 3 upgrades).
I'd recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed. Today is the first time in years an update broke something for me. Could use the built in snapshotting to roll back but i think this is a good opportunity to switch to Slowroll to try it out. Can rollback later.
I just got this device on Monday, been waiting for over half a year for it.
I love it, but also wow, so many random things I have had to do the past few days.
I think this provides a good prospective compared to all the mainstream posts about it that aren't going in depth on linux and the usability on there at this current time.
Thanks for the article, I thought it was very helpful! You mentioned it a little bit, but is the trackpad better on wayland? How does it compare to a MBP?
And finally, can you dock the framework laptop to a USB-C docking station for external monitor support? I haven’t seen a lot of reviews mention this and I’m curious what that looks like today.
Would you have the same experience if some gave you a Thinkpad instead? Seems like most issues are Linux related and non-Linux users would have the most sooprise about having to config/diy/hack/tweak/script something. No?
I'm currently in the queue for one of these, and was expecting there to be some minor issues like these (fingerprint sensor, some driver/kernel related performance issues) as is often the case when running desktop Linux.
The difference between Framework and other laptop manufacturers however is that it has shown that it is actively tackling these issues, and so I'm not so worried.
Couple that with the fact that components are upgradable, I am not so worried about being let down by this machine once I get it (I won't feel locked in to a unchanging brick). It is still early days for this company and product, so my expectations about a hiccup free experience are tempered (I'm sure the first 80's Machintosh or 90's Thinkpads were less than perfect).
My one strong hope though is that this form factor will be able to get a slightly larger battery in the near future.
Power management is where the framework laptops really suffer under Linux.
I truly prefer Linux as an OS but my framework goes unused in favor of my MacBook Air because the former simply can’t hold a charge for more than a few days of standby or a few hours of use. I believe it’s the WiFi firmware which is known to have bad power management support on Linux.
Linux overall trackpad support is WAY better now than 5 years ago, but gnome/kde/drivers have room to grow to be as good as Apple. Framework is getting close though to my ideal laptop. The Dell XPS line is also a good linux choice too.
> For modern apps not using Wayland…. full gesture support, fractional scaling, etc doesn’t work. After fixing firefox, I noticed Slack was incredibly fuzzy…. it doesn’t use Wayland.
Every time I read stuff like this I feel like a bit of a outlier, because in all the years I've been using Slack, I've never used it as anything other than a web application (despite occasionally being pestered to download the Electron version).
I already have a perfectly good browser, what's the point of running another one (with potential compatibility issues) just for Slack?
After switching from an 11th gen Intel Dell XPS, to a M1 Macbook, I resist returning to PC laptops (even though I prefer Windows) until someone confirms that newer Ryzen and Intel chips are comparable in terms of "perceived performance" to Apple silicon. The whole laptop simply becomes syrupy on battery. Even if I go high performance mode in Windows settings, the whole device is just so laggy compared to a Macbook. And, in high performance mode, the laptop has probably at _most_ 2 hours of battery life in it.
I'm on a 6850U Ryzen Windows machine and it's really smooth. Previously I too was using an 11th gen XPS 13 but on Linux, where battery was approximately 2 hours long.
This machine feels both smooth, cool and for my usages there's no slowdowns on battery either (usually running few browser windows, a VM that's not taxed too hard and an IDE).
> I noticed Slack was incredibly fuzzy…. it doesn’t use Wayland.
People should stop using that crappy Electron Apps, that does exactly the same thing that opening a webapp page on a tab of your browser. Seriously, you are wasting RAM and CPU (and battery) doing that. And this it's totally independent of you using Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD...
I use Slack and Discord from the web browser, and I don't have any issues. Also, I get fro free, better support of that webapps running in Wayland
How does the sound / speaker system compare to a MacBook Pro? In my experience Apple just blows every other manufacturer out of the water with sound quality.
Fractional scaling works fine for me on Fedora 39. I've had some similar issues as others with amd stability, specifically with fwupd services, glitchy video playback, lots of amdgpu errors in the logs, etc...
You can dim the fingerprint reader from the BIOS settings to what I consider acceptable levels, though I hate that blue is the LED color of choice for so many things. I buy stickers to dim them in the office and bedroom.
I didn't have problems with the foam that the author did. I did have some initial boot issues where nothing happened for a few attempts. They quickly went away for whatever reason on their own.
I can't speak to battery life, my use-case keeps the laptop on power most of the time, so I set the charge percentage to 60% in the BIOS per it's recommendation to save long-term battery health.
It's too early to feel like it's a 100% solid, but it's good enough for me to use as the daily driver. I knew what I was getting into when I ordered it. I know it'll get much better within a short time. No intentions of looking back for me. I am very happy with my purchase.
The idea is nice, but I guess not until the scale is up and production cost come down a bit that the Framework laptop will become more appeal to me.
By the time I want to upgrade my laptop, the hardware (CPU/RAM/GPU) would be updated so much that buying a new laptop will be cheaper and more powerful. There is no reason to swap parts.
The point of this laptop is that you can upgrade the cpu/gpu. But I would wait a couple of generations for this.
I am a gen 1 batch 2 supporter and I stopped using mine after a year when the M2 Air came out. Mine is unusable since it throttles to 200Mhz under load and is difficult for it to recover. That load being normal software development or any game. It now sits running BOINC tasks at 80% CPU because it will throttle if I set it to 100% CPU.
I'm in batch 7 of this laptop's shipment waves which I expect to actually release mid to late December and it seems like that's a good thing. Still very much looking forward to it, but being super early in the AMD 7040 series releases adds to some stability situations. Overall, I'm not worried about kernel support and compatibility over the next few months, especially as the AMD 7040s release with other manufacturers as well.
And the conclusion is just about most GNU/Linux related devices for the last 25 years, with exception of the netbooks golden age with their OEM specific distros.
[+] [-] nrp|2 years ago|reply
We (without intending to) ended up being among the first to ship a Ryzen 7040 U-series laptop, which means Linux support is early and depends on having the right kernel version. As others have noted in the comments, we were in a similar place when we were one of the earlier ones on both 12th Gen Intel Core and 13th Gen Intel Core, and both matured rapidly.
AMD continues to improve things with each release, and we've sent hardware to folks at Canonical for Ubuntu and Red Hat for Fedora to help speed along the process of having the out of the box experience with popular distros be smooth.
[+] [-] bootloop|2 years ago|reply
Eagerly awaiting my batch to ship. Very happy that I see a great team being in charge of this product.
Also thanks for being proactive in supporting the Linux community.
[+] [-] guerby|2 years ago|reply
Do you ship early models to linux kernel developpers and may be distribution developpers?
[+] [-] verall|2 years ago|reply
It seems like I got the least supported mainboard, which kind of sucks. If I knew this one was unsupported I would have just bought the 11th gen.
I love the HW design and modularity and there are FW problems with like every laptop ever but it doesn't change how much this problem sucks.
[+] [-] whazor|2 years ago|reply
At the moment, my Intel 12th gen mainboard BIOS has several vulnerabilities and many people are waiting for updates.
In a couple of years, you will have to support even more mainboards and I hope you are working on software infrastructure to properly support that.
[+] [-] rowanG077|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperman1|2 years ago|reply
My non-technical wife's laptop is needing replacement. I was going to buy a second hand thinkpad, but if enough stars align, a framework might be a good option.
[+] [-] Jhsto|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackify|2 years ago|reply
I’ve seen multiple other forum users unable to update fingerprint sensors in Linux with the same problem I had.
Also I’ve seen threads asking why Ubuntu freezes and if anyone else is having problems.
You guys explained in 1 forum post that amd is working on a fix for the second issue, and nobody has really mentioned the fwupd freezes some of us run into.
It’s just one more example of stuff in too many places. The official Ubuntu install guide doesn’t mention a new fix is coming to fix freezes and the place that does is a forum post that many people may miss.
Need 1 hub page for each device with some sort of stream of updates.
I have to bookmark the bios guide page to find out if new ones are out, a forum post to see if there is new changes with Ubuntu, stuff is a little far apart and manual process to find updates.
[+] [-] voltagex_|2 years ago|reply
I was trying to avoid reviews like this because I didn't want to be thinking about all the problems instead of looking forward to my new laptop.
I am now wondering if I should have gone Intel.
[+] [-] luyu_wu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sva_|2 years ago|reply
I've recently gotten an Elitebook 845 G10 which runs on a Ryzen 7 Pro 7840HS, and battery life was at first shit. The issue was with the BIOS being bugged and not allowing ASPM. After manually activating, I now get around 12-15 hours on a 50Wh battery, depending on use of course. Results still preliminary though, more testing needs to be done.
Btw, I chose the Elitebook because it actually features great repairability. Pretty much everything can be swapped out, including memory. I was reluctant to buy HP, mostly due to the reputation they earned with their printer business shenanigans, but so far don't regret the purchase at all. In fact I like this device more and more.
Pretty much everything worked out of the box with ArchLinux, except for ASPM, which I was able to fix within a couple hours.
edit: Oh and the main motivation behind preferring the Elitebook over the Framework was the price. I mean really? Upgrade to 7840 almost 400 Euro? Lenovo charges like 80 Euro for that. For 1200 Euro I got the aforementioned CPU with a beautiful 120hz, 500nits, 2560x1600 screen, 2x16GB 5600 DDR5 SO-DIMM, 1TB NVME, etc. But it was a student offer.
[+] [-] bubblethink|2 years ago|reply
- No insert key
- No external display before OS. Can't do luks password over external monitor.
- Miscellaneous AMD bugs: vp9 hw decoding broken, s2idle sleep fails occasionally, gets stuck in lowest frequency sometimes, several others that have slowly been fixed on mainline
- Battery life is pretty mediocre. 5-6 hours of browsing, 2-3 hours of video.
[+] [-] rwky|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imp0cat|2 years ago|reply
However, HP's software is less than stellar. What annoys me the most is the fact that the latest BIOS update completely broke USB-C dock and monitor detection.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aembleton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eduard|2 years ago|reply
This. By now, I have set up and maintained enough installations of diverse open / hobbyist products (e.g. Debian, Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant, Mixxx, Jellybean, Nextcloud... ) to come to the conclusion that an unorganized, unmaintained, laissez-fair user community democrized potpourri of "knowledge bases" quickly becomes a huge issue.
It sucks to have to hunt around a multitude of issue trackers, wikis, discussion forums, mailing list archives, Gitlab pages, web sites etc. to find solutions.
Sometimes, it is comment #297 in some paginated forum thread that helped, as previous nonworking answers in the same thread related to another software release version, using and referencing a different setup implicitly referencing comment #246 a couple of pages before.
[+] [-] nrp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brosco|2 years ago|reply
But I'm happy to say that after the first two weeks or so, it's been rock solid. The issues I had with wifi were patched pretty quickly, and everything else pretty much just works with the default configuration. The only thing is the battery life is still bad, partly because I have way too much RAM...
[+] [-] kvark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treffer|2 years ago|reply
And it is particularly bad timing. 23.10 was released yesterday, so a new kernel should roll into 22.04 soon. It would also fix most of the software complaints if the auther would have used 23.10.
Please save yourself from the hassle of compiling a kernel, especially for Ubuntu (the userspace _expects_ Ubuntu patches, e.g. for apparmor). Pick a distro with a recent release, and for Ubuntu in particular check if you can live with 2 upgrades a year until you reach the next LTS (April of even years, so right now the _next_ upgrade. Worst case is 3 upgrades).
[+] [-] scns|2 years ago|reply
https://www.phoronix.com/news/openSUSE-Slowroll
[+] [-] zackify|2 years ago|reply
Using this special oem kernel on 22.04.3
[+] [-] zackify|2 years ago|reply
I love it, but also wow, so many random things I have had to do the past few days.
I think this provides a good prospective compared to all the mainstream posts about it that aren't going in depth on linux and the usability on there at this current time.
Overall, I love this device!
[+] [-] SamuelAdams|2 years ago|reply
And finally, can you dock the framework laptop to a USB-C docking station for external monitor support? I haven’t seen a lot of reviews mention this and I’m curious what that looks like today.
[+] [-] pella|2 years ago|reply
"AMD Ryzen Powered Framework Laptop Linux Testing Held Up By BIOS Issue"
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Framework-Linux-Hold
[+] [-] wesapien|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrDresden|2 years ago|reply
The difference between Framework and other laptop manufacturers however is that it has shown that it is actively tackling these issues, and so I'm not so worried.
Couple that with the fact that components are upgradable, I am not so worried about being let down by this machine once I get it (I won't feel locked in to a unchanging brick). It is still early days for this company and product, so my expectations about a hiccup free experience are tempered (I'm sure the first 80's Machintosh or 90's Thinkpads were less than perfect).
My one strong hope though is that this form factor will be able to get a slightly larger battery in the near future.
[+] [-] semiquaver|2 years ago|reply
I truly prefer Linux as an OS but my framework goes unused in favor of my MacBook Air because the former simply can’t hold a charge for more than a few days of standby or a few hours of use. I believe it’s the WiFi firmware which is known to have bad power management support on Linux.
[+] [-] jadbox|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teraflop|2 years ago|reply
Every time I read stuff like this I feel like a bit of a outlier, because in all the years I've been using Slack, I've never used it as anything other than a web application (despite occasionally being pestered to download the Electron version).
I already have a perfectly good browser, what's the point of running another one (with potential compatibility issues) just for Slack?
[+] [-] augustl|2 years ago|reply
Has this improved since 11th gen Intel?
[+] [-] inertiatic|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kohlerm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Capricorn2481|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] papichulo2023|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zardoz84|2 years ago|reply
People should stop using that crappy Electron Apps, that does exactly the same thing that opening a webapp page on a tab of your browser. Seriously, you are wasting RAM and CPU (and battery) doing that. And this it's totally independent of you using Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD...
I use Slack and Discord from the web browser, and I don't have any issues. Also, I get fro free, better support of that webapps running in Wayland
[+] [-] OJFord|2 years ago|reply
I don't want to switch to my browser for Slack and then dig through tabs to find it, I want just to switch to Slack.
[+] [-] binkHN|2 years ago|reply
How is this even remotely acceptable?
[+] [-] fsflover|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamuelAdams|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maztaim|2 years ago|reply
You can dim the fingerprint reader from the BIOS settings to what I consider acceptable levels, though I hate that blue is the LED color of choice for so many things. I buy stickers to dim them in the office and bedroom.
I didn't have problems with the foam that the author did. I did have some initial boot issues where nothing happened for a few attempts. They quickly went away for whatever reason on their own.
I can't speak to battery life, my use-case keeps the laptop on power most of the time, so I set the charge percentage to 60% in the BIOS per it's recommendation to save long-term battery health.
It's too early to feel like it's a 100% solid, but it's good enough for me to use as the daily driver. I knew what I was getting into when I ordered it. I know it'll get much better within a short time. No intentions of looking back for me. I am very happy with my purchase.
[+] [-] vietvu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ripply|2 years ago|reply
I am a gen 1 batch 2 supporter and I stopped using mine after a year when the M2 Air came out. Mine is unusable since it throttles to 200Mhz under load and is difficult for it to recover. That load being normal software development or any game. It now sits running BOINC tasks at 80% CPU because it will throttle if I set it to 100% CPU.
[+] [-] darthrupert|2 years ago|reply
I hope to get a good Linux laptop again some day since the OS and UX are so much better there, but that day isn't here yet.
[+] [-] jjice|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|2 years ago|reply