I am absolutely flummoxed by this review. Mine is configured with nearly identical specs (except that I have 64GB RAM) and is one of the worst purchases I've ever made.
Enabling deep sleep works fine; waking from it is impossible. WiFi stops working. The touch pad becomes hypersensitive. I've resorted to turning the whole thing completely off after every use. But the battery still loses power even when the machine is completely powered down.
The machine also freezes if I try to open a jpg or a PDF from the file explorer. Just completely freezes. Fan spins up like crazy, but as I mentioned, I have 64GB of RAM in this thing. It should be able to open a single one-page scanned document from my own scanner. If there's anything wrong with the file, this is the computer that's making the file poorly.
The internet connection also just turns off after about half an hour of use. I have a Belkin dock with Ethernet plugged into it, which is then plugged into my Framework's USB-C port. This dock supports my work Mac all work day every day with no issues at all, so it's not the dock's problem. But the Framework? Internet just stops working after half an hour. And it manages to kill both wired and WiFi when it dies. I can turn them back on, but this is a ridiculous problem to have.
This last point is pretty minor, but the hinges are floppy. The whole screen shakes around when I type on it.
I have no idea how this author's experience is so much better than mine unless they just haven't used it much yet, but I regret absolutely everything about the purchase of this machine and feel like I was sold a bill of goods by all the glowing positive reviews all over the internet.
We definitely want to help you resolve these issues. Most of them sound like specific compatibility challenges on Ubuntu 21.10. To be clear, I agree that we need to get better with new Ubuntu releases. We've been providing hardware to the team at Fedora and have full support out of the box with Fedora 35, but don't have a setup like that with Ubuntu yet.
really curios if there is ANY overlap of your target audience and fedora users.
i mean, for a top-down approach i would probably also choose redhat because they seem to have structures for a streamlined b2b communication and commitment, but on the other hand i absolutely know nobody who uses it apart from the odd researcher and enterprise-it guys.
I'm with you. My configuration is more-or-less maxed out and at over $2500 it's one of the more regretful large purchases I've ever made. Current issues:
- As has been noted time and time again, battery life is atrocious. As in unusable for even the travel time required for a three hour flight: factoring in the poor sleep, an hour at the airport, and time on the aircraft the battery is dead. Crazy for 2021/2022 - my eight year old Macbook does better.
- Wifi. The Intel Wifi modules provided with the Framework are very poorly supported in Linux. I spent six hours the other night running additional ethernet drops because I just couldn't stand my workday routinely being interrupted by repeatedly disassociating from my AP (fixed with reboot). Even unloading and reloading the associated kernel modules wouldn't bring it back.
- USB-C acts... Strange. I have two 4K displays using Displayport over USB-C and the Framework repeatedly fails to initialize them from boot. I have to do a strange dance (the steps of which I'm still figuring out) involving powering off the Framework, unplugging/re-plugging everything, and then rebooting until it magically works again.
- Fan. The fan is crazy. I've settled on disabling turbo mode in Linux.
- Build quality. I'm convinced if I drop this thing it's all over.
All in all I'm mad at myself for spending over $3k on a productivity configuration centered around what is pretty much beta hardware. I should have known better.
Anyway, there's hope for some of these issues as they seem to be releasing BIOS updates pretty regularly (currently running 3.07) but even then I need to USB boot to use their EFI update tool. Intel wifi should get better over time and worst case I can swap it out for Atheros or something. That said I think the battery, build, and fan issues are fundamental hardware design choices.
- Re battery: Yup, battery life during sleep sucks, it seems like this is mostly an Intel 11th gen issue as S3 sleep went away and folks on Dell, Lenovo, etc., 11th gen hardware have similar issues.
- Re Fan: it does seem to like to ramp up a bit too much even when components are not really that hot yet.
- Re USB-C: have not used that, so cannot comment
- Re build quality: yes, it is a bit flimsier than I would like (though have definitely used laptops that are way worse), but it is also lighter than competitors that are less so. I am mostly okay with that trade-off, others may not be.
As you say, the company has been responsive and helpful on the community forums in a way the big players never have been, and the BIOS updates are fixing genuine issues and complaints with real release notes. It's not all great for sure, but there's lots of things that are a lot better than competitors.
Andrew noted in a sibling comment what the issue was with the AX210 in Linux. Intel has informed us that the patch is going into kernel 5.17. In retrospect had we known how many issues we'd see with AX210 relative to AX201, we would have gone with the latter as the default option on the DIY Edition. Going forward though, we do expect compatibility and stability to improve (on 5.17 and later).
On the USB-C issues, it would be great to know the model numbers of the displays and cables that are having this issue. We want to continue to build up our library of peripherals that have unknown issues in order to resolve them.
On build quality, we've seen exceeding few field failures on mechanical issues, and a couple of reports of people dropping their system (or as often happens, blaming their cat for this) from high enough to dent a corner of the chassis and then being able resolve that by ordering a replacement cover part from us.
> The machine also freezes if I try to open a jpg or a PDF from the file explorer. Just completely freezes. Fan spins up like crazy, but as I mentioned, I have 64GB of RAM in this thing. It should be able to open a single one-page scanned document from my own scanner. If there's anything wrong with the file, this is the computer that's making the file poorly.
This almost certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with the framework itself. That sounds like a software bug all day long. Something about your OS install is broken or similar.
The only other possibility seems like it'd be if the storage drive is broken. Which could then possibly be why you're experiencing so many other issues, if things like code pages are just failing to load or getting corrupted in the same way your JPG isn't able to load.
But it seems like starting with a fsck or even a re-install seems like a good idea.
> This almost certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with the framework itself.
I mean... Kind of? It's pretty clear that they're driver issues. Hardware manufacturers have to make in-roads with OS teams to get these things delivered flawlessly, otherwise they have to wait for the community to build fixes. System76 and Lenovo do their best to get ahead of driver issues from what I've seen. I'm assuming a lot of this has to do with the fact that OP is running 21.10 rather than an LTS release.
You have to go to bios and disable secure boot, then the battery doesn’t get drained anymore when the lid is closed. You also have to disable ps2 mouse emulation in bios, the mouse hypersensitivity goes away after that. I also enabled large text in accessibility so the text size is perfect and super high res with the 3:2 aspect screen, it’s fantastic.
I just bought the framework and running ubuntu 21.10. I had some of the problems you mentioned but the forum has solutions to many. It’s a new product, and specially with Linux, I knew there would be some problems. You have to be willing to solve these problems o/w you should stay away from buying new hardware from a startup.
IMO, a computer should work decently without needing to tweak the BIOS. If a feature is "experimental" and is likely to cause problems, it should be disabled by default.
> disable secure boot, then the battery doesn’t get drained anymore when the lid is closed
Do you have a link to further elaboration and testing on this? Seems strange, and searching the forums is a bit difficult since the two terms get mentioned together a lot.
They work fine under Windows. Ergo the problem isn't the laptop, its the driver support under Linux.
In my experience current gen laptops except for certain ThinkPads and Clevos will have support issues in Linux. You get a much better experience using a model a year or two old because the community has had time to address any issues.
The design goal of the Framework wasn't out of the box 100% Linux support, it was reparability. While they encourage Linux development on the platform, what hardware works best to meet their design goal may or may not already have Linux support.
> You get a much better experience using a model a year or two old because the community has had time to address any issues.
It's what I do. I bought a used LG Gram 17" with 24 GB of RAM about 18 months ago I think. Ultra lightweight (I think it's the lightest 17" laptop that exists) and I've got zero issue under Linux. It may not be as good as the Mac M1 I also own but it is lighter, has more RAM, works fine with Linux and cost me only 400 EUR (granted, that was a good deal back then).
For a laptop running Linux I never buy the latest of the latest.
I've pre-ordered my framework with the expectation that Linux support will rapidly improve because lots of hackers will buy them, same as what happened with classic thinkpads.
I am surprised by the review also. While not mine a friend owns a Framework laptop and I have spent many hours trying to help them get it working as well as the Dell Latitude it replaced.
WiFi and power draw issues are the biggest two problems they continue to experience.
Also while the screen is very nice it is let down by the resolution. It isn’t high enough to used at 2x scaling but non-integer scaling really hits battery and performance. I feel that was a terrible oversight.
It is a shame as the laptops overall build quality is very good. Hopefully these common issues can be sorted properly as I would be interested in picking one up once it has rocked solid Linux support. Also a higher (or lower) resolution panel option would be nice. After all it is the Framework laptop, surely they should have different panel options :)
If I have to turn on scaling I always think I screwed up. I spent too much on pixel density that I can't even use, so now I have to make everything aliased just to read the text.
It’s probably the USB-C dock - I have the same issues with a Lenovo laptop and Ubuntu 20 LTS but works fine without dock connected.
On my phone now but there was a bug report I found to match this - apparently 5.14 kernel might work better but I haven’t been able to install it yet from the 3rd party repo.
I have been using mine (64GB with Ubuntu 21.04, Gnome Flashback) for the past several months as my primary work laptop. I have not experienced any of the issues you mention. I like it so far. In fact, hardly notice it. Except maybe when I do sudo/login. I can use my fingerprint instead of password :). My earlier laptop was a 2012 MacBook Pro which gave up last year. I do have an M1 which is used exclusively for iOS dev.
I did have to tweak few things mentioned in their community page/forum to get everything working.
Two issues (which hasn't bothered me yet)
- battery drain during suspend
- gnome not supporting different scaling with multiple monitors (fixed in later version of gnome as I understand)
As a counterpoint, I've been running Fedora on my DIY Framework since mid-October without any issues (besides needing to install a Respin to get the required WiFi driver). Even upgraded from Fedora 34 to 35 just fine. Enabled deep sleep and it's working as intended, issues with WiFi have always been due to Spectrum's terrible non-fiber service, etc.
What OS did you install? It could be related to their choice to install a cutting edge version of Ubuntu versus Ubuntu LTS (for patches that may resolve some of what you're experiencing).
First Ubuntu 21.10 like the author. Then reverted to 21.04 because the Framework forums recommended that to get the WiFi card working at all (it didn't on 21.10).
With the RAM exception, my Framework and the author's appear to be apples to apples.
That's why this review confuses me so much; we appear to be using almost the exact same machine.
That's surprising to hear. I've had one for a few months now. I pulled the nvme drive from my old laptop, put it in the framework laptop, and it booted up and has been running great. I haven't had any issues opening a jpg/pdf, waking up from sleep, or wifi dying.
Which isn't to disregard what you're experiencing, but maybe try updating the firmware? I've seen at least one email they sent out about new firmware that people should probably install if they haven't yet. And maybe try out a liveusb just to see if there's something weird in your installation?
Have you contacted their tech support to see how they stand by their claims? (Not asking to be passive-aggressive; genuinely curious to hear about their after-sales.)
I see their team working alongside the community in the forums trying to troubleshoot my issues and issues like them, but I haven't found solutions there and haven't contacted them directly.
I have also had wireless issues, but since I've only installed NixOS I can't tell if it's because of the OS or some hardware issues.
I also thing (again very minor) that the hinge is too loose. If I have it on my lap and type on it the hinge slowly opens up. I wish there was a stiffer hinge.
I have no issues with mine, except for the deep sleep one. The current prevailing theory on the forums suggests it's got something to do with PCIe Gen4 SSD firmware. The issue is widespread enough that I'm hopeful we'll see a fix soon enough.
The framework is not the best short-term laptop I've ever had, but it's Solid and if the company sticks around should be the best _long-term_ laptop I've ever owned.
- Deep sleep works fine; wake works fine (with a ~10s delay; that's just linux i think)
- Battery is far better than my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen. (have not really tested, but at a guess, solid 6-8 hours; which for linux is solidly average-to-good i think)
- Never freezes
- Fans are fine (way, way better than my 2018 macbook pro...)
- Network is fine (I had issues at first, but was my fault due to faulty systemd configuration)
- Hinges could be tighter, but no issue with practical use (I'm typing on this on my lap right now and it's fine)
- I use it practically every day for hours at a time.
- I've dropped it at least 2 times -- once from ~3-4 feet high (onto carpet). Totally fine functionally; though the monitor back now has a slight protrusion.
- but hey, it's modular so I can just replace the screen at some point if I really want to (nit: hopefully they'll come out with a matte screen)
Basically the original post here is n=1 so, i mean... the framework is the most exciting laptop "ideology" frankly ever. And even this first 'beta' version is super solid.
I haven't seen a lot of the problems you're seeing, but I definitely have seen this one. Not only is the touch pad hard to use because it's very sensitive, just using the builtin keyboard can accidentally cause the touch pad to be activated. I've read up on ways of fixing this in Linux, but I haven't quite found the trick to make the touch pad behave as well as the Mac touch pad, which is what I'm used to. I haven't even really found a fix yet, so I type very carefully, avoiding resting my hands on the laptop, when I'm not using an external keyboard.
I feel like this happens with any item. For example, I've been supremely happy with all the Apple laptops I've ever owned, but have seen others with a litany of problems. Could it be that you got a dud with some sort of hardware problem? Try contacting their support and maybe they'll let you exchange it or something.
The author does not address the screen resolution (and just says the screen is nice) but I'm hearing that the screen res is a bit to high to work with without scaling and a tad to low to do 2x scaling. And people don't like fractional scaling, at least in Gnome (it seems to look weird). Is this still an issue?
I tend to prefer 1080p for this reason on 12-14" screens. My Thinkpad X13 gen 2 has a 13.3", 1920x1200 screen, windows sets it to 150%, which seems ok, although Ubuntu works well for me without scaling still. The Frame work laptop has an even higher res (2256x1504). I do hear people scaling the fonts and that seems to be a nice solution... I remember from back in the old days that I never really liked the look of this.
What do people think of this? I'm hoping that in the future you can choose the screen (and easily get replacements as well, I hear they are working on that).
Edit: I hope these issues are being addressed by established DE's, I'm assuming they won't be an issue on Canonical's (hypothetical ;)) Flutter based DE that's (obviously ;)) coming and on System76's Rust based new DE for Pop OS [0].
I run Mint with 2x scaling on mine and I like it a lot. The screen's not quite as sharp as the one on the old XPS it replaced, but it's still quite nice.
I run a middling-width monospace font, and I can't quite fit two 80-column windows side by side at 2x without reducing the font size, but if you want that then you want smaller text anyway. (If you run a narrow font it shouldn't be an issue.) Other UI elements are not unreasonably large in my opinion, but YMMV.
I like my fonts on the quite small side; ~14" @ 2256x1504 sounds ideal to me.
That aside, I've been playing around with fractional scaling in Wayland on everything from a 6" Pinephone to 32"@4k in various configurations and it's been mostly painless. Mostly terminal, web browsing, Steam games (latter not on the Pinephone obv). I wouldn't be surprised if there can be issues with xwayland that I'm yet to experience.
As an aside, I’m increasingly convinced that Fedora is probably the best Linux distro around right now for both enthusiasts and beginners.
Great stability. Close to the edge of progress. And they focus on delivering real unique value on top of what others have created as opposed to reskinning and hacking Gnome.
I’ve never used Fedora but I’m keen on moving over my personal desktop the next time I have a couple of days to mess around with it.
1440p is hugely common on gaming laptops. Alienware M15, Razer Blade 14/15, Lenovo Legion 5, etc... all offer displays in the QHD or WQXGA range.
The reason you typically see 1080p or 4k on ultrabooks is because 1080p is how you get the low entry price, and 4k is what sounds better on marketing and looks the best for text-related things (4k is not at all useless - the sharpness it provides to text is noticeable). The balance that QHD provides isn't very desirable in that market usually, although there are exceptions like the Framework laptop or the Surface Laptop 4. Usually those exceptions then also come with more unique aspect ratio displays like 3:2, though, so they aren't exactly 1440p/QHD. But they are in that density.
Resolution is independent of size. Just because it doesn't work perfectly on Linux high DPI is much nicer and easier to read.
The decapsulate on of resolution and size is btw already quite old. Games have this as well were they dynamically change the internal resolution but not the screen resolution.
And you might not care about it but:
- text is much smoother
- images from DSLR have higher resolution than 4k for ages and you can see the difference
The only arguments against 4k on smaller screens should be power consumption and not scaling issues. But for this we should focus on dynamic refrehsrates and similar power saving mechanism and again NOT complaining about 4k.
MacOS is doing this flawless for years. Windows can do it and under Linux it starts to be usable based on comments of this article.
I’m not on Ubuntu but using Wayland on nixos. Fractional scaling does not look or work well at all in my experience. I decided on 1.0 scaling and pushed it all over to font sizing (around 1.5). This works pretty well for most apps but it is a little small sometimes. The biggest issue is having to manually scale up some apps that don’t keep my preferences.
Gnome's accessibility feature "larger text" works a bit better than font scaling IMEx. With font scaling often some alignment and spacing seems odd. And you can toggle "larger text" with one click, if you make the accessibility menu permanent.
Isn't scaling from 3072x1728 to 3840x2160 (so 125%) very blurry? A one-pixel line at 3072x1728 would be spread over slight more than line pixel wide on 4k.
To get nice integer scaling one could render at 15360x8640 (16k) which is 5x3072x1728 and 4x3840x2160 but I doubt that's what Wayland is doing. No common graphics card could handle that.
The font hinting relies on the resolution too. By scaling the rendered pixmap 125% the fonts would look bad too. Rendering the fonts in a larger size at the native screen resolution should look better.
The screen resolution is my least favourite aspect of the Framework, for sure. Not a deal breaker, but every now and then my eye catches a poorly aliased bit of text and gets sad.
I've basically resigned myself to running Sway in 1.5x scale mode, which means that things get rendered at 2x and scaled down. Sway does about as well as I think any desktop environment could be expected to, but it's never going to be the same as rendering at true screen resolution. Alas, running in 1x or 2x and using font settings to handle it breaks down the moment you connect to an external display that really is 1x or 2x.
That said, I love the rest of the laptop (well, maybe except the battery life), so my hope is that at some point we can buy a replacement screen at a more useful resolution, at which point I'll be first in line to buy and install it.
In my experience, fractional scaling in Gnome Wayland works at least as well as on Windows. I use 150% on my 4K 27" monitor and have experienced basically zero problems in the last few months.
> I do hear people scaling the fonts and that seems to be a nice solution... I remember from back in the old days that I never really liked the look of this.
I'm doing this, in particular on a 24" 4k screen. It's true that it may look a bit "weird", in that fonts are huge compared to other UI elements.
However, for me that's a win. I don't care to have huge buttons or what have you, I mostly use shortcuts. So I get nice, sharp fonts and also get to have smaller UI elements which leave more screen space for the text.
Personally, I've found fractional scaling on Gnome makes the window furniture too large for my taste. I've settled on boosting the default font size in gnome-tweaks to 125% instead, which makes font rendering match the DPI of my monitor but leaves window bars / tool bars etc at a more sensible size.
I am on gnome 41+wayland and quite satisfied with fractional scaling. That is with 4k@1.5X+2560x1440@1X. Fractional scaling related issues don't seem to be more often than programs not supporting wayland and scaling at all (in which case those programs are slightly blurry but reasonable size). There are certain settings which need to be enabled, they might be enabled by default on some distros. I might not notice some of the issues due to bad scaling at 4k still being comparable to lower resolution screen, unless things break badly. Issues might be more obvious with ~2K at 1.25-1.5 scale. Things may be slightly simpler in single monitor setups without mixed scaling. How much of effort configuring stuff is acceptable depends on person and what kind of software they commonly use.
* Gnome the desktop -> org.gnome.mutter/experimental-features "scale-monitor-framebuffer". Only integer scales available without this. Following assume that this is enabled.
* gnome apps: work great out of the box
* QT apps: Qt5 requires QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland environment variable to force wayland backend. Enabled by default in Qt6. Used to be quite bad ~1-2 years ago, but is now usable.
* Firefox: MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
* chromium and electron: --ozone-platform=wayland seems fine for chrome, but some electron apps went crazy when moving between windows with different scale. Maybe the electron app bundled an older chrome version. No issues (except less sharp text) when not enabling the experimental wayland backend.
I've been wondering about this for a while. Why do we need scale numbers and can't use dpi? Essentially if wayland (or desktops shells) would specify sizes in a "real world unit" changing the size of windows, text etc would just mean changing the dpi. In particular it would be trivial to have different size/resolution monitors display the elements at the same size. Considering if elemtents are vector graphics we don't even need fractional scaling for desktop elements.
Now we still would need to scale images etc, but that is much less an issue than fractional scaling text or lines etc.
The only program I’ve seen do it “properly” is Darktable, which has a dots-per-inch setting for things which have to be compatible with real-world linear measurements (WYSIWYG stuff for the most part), a dots-per-degree setting for things which depend on how far away you are sitting from your screen (UI element size), and a font size. I suspect the reason people don’t regularly do this is the same as the reason CSS no longer has pixels: it’s difficult to design (in the declarative CSS model) with more than one independent length unit.
(I just went to check my several-years-old impressions against Darktable’s almost-undocumented config file, and... it no longer seems to have these settings? I’m not sure.)
Unfortunately, the “UI scale” thing seems to be baked into Wayland nowadays; I have no idea how to get Evince to realize that an A4 sheet at 100% should be 210 cm wide whatever my screen resolution and “UI scale”.
It's incredibly hard to change course if the UI toolkits weren't designed for it in the first place.
Android is still about the only OS with reliable density independence. It's also the only one where things like DPI were an initial part of the UI system, and not something bolted on later.
Windows has been trying to retrofit density independence for nearly a decade now, and it's still pretty hit or miss. Apple didn't bother trying at all, and has been more successful at pretending it works (so scale rendering by whole numbers only, then fractionally scale the resulting image to the actual display size). Web browsers mostly went the Apple route, but we all also regularly expect pinch/zoom scaling to fix any glaring issues anyway and just accept it's kinda janky. Linux... well, Linux is still struggling with the basics of putting stuff on screen (Wayland vs. X11). I wouldn't hold my breath for that ecosystem to get this UX refinement working well anytime soon. Especially not across the many UI widget systems, window managers with differing border decorations, DEs, etc...
I use Pop_OS on my Framework and loved 1.5x scaling except for screen tearing I get (YouTube for example). I reverted to 1x and increased icon and font sizes to semi compensate.
I love high res smaller screens. I have the X13 with 2560x1600. I leave the screen at 100% (perfect size for window widgets, etc.) and scale fonts by 1.5. Works great and everything is super sharp. I can also scale down the fonts if I want and don't lose the sharpness due to the increased dpi.
I've got a Thinkpad with a 14" screen at 2256x1504. Running Wayland and SwayWM, I could never get integer or fractional scaling to work just right. In the end, turning off system-wide scaling and configuring apps that don't scale automatically was what did the trick.
I used to have issues with two different screens that needed different scaling but as of 20.04 it's mostly fine to use fractional scaling on one monitor and not the other.
I've still had some issues with some applications not scaling their widgets properly, but it's mostly ok.
I’m on PopOS running Wayland with fractional scaling to 200%. It looks fantastic imo and have only had some issues with Guake terminal when plugged in to an external monitor, which I believe may be a Guake-Wayland-specific bug.
I was in the market for a new laptop and right now I just could not find anything that would beat the M1 MacBooks on a CPU-battery-price combination, especially if you're OK 16GB of RAM - it gets a bit more competitive if you're looking at 32GB models, but even if you can compete on CPU and memory you loose hard on battery life.
I just couldn't bring myself to use macOS daily, so I punted the laptop change to next year. I wish Apple would just sell their hardware like anyone else, working with OS vendors to get it supported.
Raw CPU perf obviously favours the M1, but if you're a dev, then a laptop that can take up to 64Gb of commodity RAM & as much fast storage as you can cram into it is pretty compelling.
Compiling LLVM eats a lot of memory for instance. 16Gb is not really enough to take full advantage of the number of CPUs in a modern laptop.
Is this a laptop for everyone? Not necessarily, but for certain classes of users it's manna from heaven.
Is this really common? I mean using a laptop for such compute intensive tasks? I mostly use my macbook air m1 as a client to more powerful machines. I always have a few ssh sessions opened, a few tramp emacs buffers, some browser tab to jupyter notebooks running elsewhere...
IMHO it's a bit troublesome that it ships with a 1165G7, while competition available during the same time (e.g. T14 gen 2) is already on a noticable faster ryzen 5000 (through also stuck at only 16GiB of RAM).
I understand that upgrading the CPU is not yet quit viable at this point in time for framework but still, it noticable lacks behind the competition when it comes to CPU perf for many (all) tasks.
And things will only get harder with the Ryzen 6000 laptop CPUs coming late this year (on the German marked maybe only early next year).
And similar is true for the competition from newer Intel processors.
Edit
This kinda has me stuck, 16GiB of RAM isn't enough, but the additional perf of the newer CPU is well wanted, but then USB ports being non easily repairable on a T14 is a problem to as I somehow tend to brake them. And only 2 USB-C ports on the T14 are a proble, too.
> Graphics card - Can this be made upgradable in the future? Would seriously consider building one for gaming if they were.
Oh man if they found a way to have upgradable GPU on a laptop it would be next level! I think it can be done through M.2 slot (the reason why you can get M.2 to PCIe adapters is because M.2 provides a PCIe interface [1], some eGPU solutions use M.2 [2], IIRC it's just a 4 lanes connection through the M.2 connector but better than nothing) - so in order to make this possible on a laptop you would basically have to take small (mobile class) GPUs and solder them on a board that can be inserted in an M.2 slot... I think this is not rocket science but probably those GPUs would be expensive unless the concept really takes off and they are mass produced.
EDIT - I just remembered that in the past there were some gaming laptops with upgradeable GPU, I think they were made maybe by Asus? And if I remember correctly it was a proprietary connector (but I might be wrong)
That's my experience too. Honestly I don't think people are going to upgrade their Framework laptops much. And while they're popular now, it's still likely they'll stop producing parts (assuming the standard for each component isn't completely free to copy). Then you're out of luck.
But the real huge win is replacing broken components easily. That alone is making the Framework extremely tempting for me.
It was dells area 51m recently. I own one, and it was marketed as upgradeable, though it turns out its only upgradable in the same class e.g. mine can only be swapped with a 2060 2070 or 2080.
This is what I have been looking into for a portable gaming setup.
My framework setup already has so much raw power in terms of RAM and CPU. A solid GPU is the next step :-)
Would do a GPU pass through setup with virtio/QEMU and a Linux host… if only eGPU setups weren’t so damned expensive! And that’s not even factoring in the sheer lack of availability of 30x series cards.
Upgrading a GPU internally in a laptop chassis is tricky because you need the power/heat/space to work for the range of possible products. And I like a CPU where you might design for a 35W CPU and that gives you dozens of options from 15W to 35W, the GPU range needs to encompass 100W (!) if the purpose is meant to allow configuring as a gaming machine. This will obviously affect cooling/power supply/bulk for all who buy the laptop and don’t want the gaming config.
External GPUs have their own difficulties but I think it’s a less challenging design problem than “configurable GPUs [up to enthusiast/gaming/pro cards]”
My HP ZBook from 2014 has upgradable CPU and GPU. I guess that after a few years the problem would be to find a new part that fits into the slots or somebody selling an old compatible one at a reasonable price.
I'm using a Framework with Kubuntu and I have mixed feelings about it. I like the 3:2 screen ratio, repairability & the expansion cards. However, there are many downsides:
- The battery life is ATROCIOUS, even after TLP etc. It's about the same as my 4-year-old(!) Thinkpad. Standby battery drain is the worst, easily 20-30% overnight, which I find unacceptable. I can't use this laptop as intended and always have to switch it off completely. Also because of this:
- BIOS 3.06 ships with a bug that could result in the Framework not switching on if the battery is drained to 0%. The new beta BIOS might fix that, but errors like this show this is not a mature product.
- There are no stable LVFS firmware upgrades for Linux yet and some users also report overwritten bootloaders after upgrading. Linux compatibility is definitely not there yet.
- Many small annoyances on Linux: Fingerprint reader is not working out of the box, screen tearing, Bluetooth regressions etc. on certain kernels.
- My Framework didn't turn on for almost 2 weeks. I tried different RAM/SSDs to no avail... then, it suddenly worked again with the original components. No problems after that, very strange.
- The speakers are worse than the one in my smartphone. On most surfaces it sounds muffled and just not right.
- My CPU fan made strange noises. I could fix that thanks to the great repairability though.
- The fan can get very loud. Fortunately, it happens very rarely. Most of the time it's silent when browsing the internet or doing web dev work.
- Build quality is clearly a step down from my old Thinkpad X1 Yoga. The hinge doesn't feel as strong, some keys are mushy/creaking and I'm skeptical my Framework will survive as many falls as my old laptop.
Don't get me wrong: it's impressive for a first iteration product and a lot of modern laptops can't compete with it (despite the Framework being far more extensible). It ticks many boxes and offers a package that is hard to find these days (Lenovo & Co. seem to love soldered-on RAM, decreased keyboard travel, fewer ports).
After many glowing reviews I just expected a bit more. Coming from a 4-yo premium Thinkpad I'm not sure the Framework is an upgrade. It's more fragile, (currently) has worse Linux support & no next-day business support. I would definitely wait for the next generation of laptops.
Standby battery drain in deep sleep in Linux is something we're investigating. We have seen enough reports of it to know there is an issue there, but one that does not occur in Windows.
We do strongly recommend updating to 3.07. The issue in 3.06 was a regression that we've released 3.07 to resolve. We'll be removing the Beta label on the release shortly since we've seen large update on the release.
I agree we have work to do collaborating with Linux distro maintainers to ensure compatibility out of the box. We've been able to do that with the team at Fedora and Fedora 35 has basically complete support and solid stability: https://community.frame.work/t/fedora-linux-35-on-the-framew...
Beyond that, we very much appreciate the feedback. We're always looking to improve what we're building, and real user feedback helps us do that.
I have to disagree on the build quality, I found it really only second to MacBooks and Dell XPS. Ultimately I returned it for an M1 MacBook because of the battery. With an M1 I charge it once a week and it sips power on standby. The Framework was dropping 30-40% battery overnight on sleep.
That is most likey a Linux problem in general. Linux is known to have worse energy management. TFA explains the owner had to enable deep sleep and hibernation:
> One of the initial caveats with installing Ubuntu is that deep sleep and hibernate are not enabled by default. Deep sleep is easy to enable. Hibernate takes a bit more effort, but it’s straightforward. Once configured it works like a charm. I noticed about a 2% drain in 3 days of hibernation. If this power loss is linear, it can go for weeks in hibernation.
Unfortunately this is happening with S3 sleep and numerous battery tuning tricks activated.
Don't buy the Framework as your main laptop if you plan to travel/use it unplugged a lot - I consider it a broken device for this intended usage. Put down the lid overnight and you'll have around 2-4h SOT left (and that's with a fully charged brand-new battery).
No other business laptop in the last 15 years felt so limiting in this regard, battery life is a constant worry. My Framework won't leave the dock and I'll hope manufacturers close the gap to the M1 soon (I don't care about raw power, but energy efficiency).
I'm running Xubuntu 21.10 on my Framework and am relatively happy. Mine stays docked most of the time without much travel so haven't noticed the battery issues.
> - There are no stable LVFS firmware upgrades for Linux yet and some users also report overwritten bootloaders after upgrading. Linux compatibility is definitely not there yet.
At the moment, you can't upgrade BIOS on Linux systems without using Windows which is a major shortcoming. No LVFS support is a big miss right now for Linux users
I've measured a drain of ~0.9% per hour on mine when the lid is closed (deep sleep, not hibernating) and I've only USB-C expansion cards slotted in (or no cards at all). When I've two USB-C cards and and 2 USB-A cards it goes up to ~2%/hr. So your large drain might (~3%/hr) might be mostly from whichever cards you've got in.
I'm self employed. The laptop is my main "tool". If I was in construction this would be comparable to a van load of power tools and then some.
I spend more time using it than any other tool I have.
It's also a taxable expense.
So for me the £2000+ I paid for my laptop to max it out to the extreme is money well spent.
Did I mention it's a taxable expense?
I have a ten year old X220 with an SSD upgrade.... I don't have to wait for anything really, either. Don't get me wrong, I know there is a difference, but... is it a 2000$ difference?
This is about snappiness only, I have no trouble finding workloads stressing this old i5 (e.g. 2k/4k videos), where an M1 would fly through. Personally, I just think snappiness alone is a bit forced argument to spent 2k$.
I live in a country where the average salary is $20k and the M1 MacBook Air STARTS at $1330. Devs here still often use MacBooks or similarly priced higher-end machines. So yeah, good laptops are worth it even in much poorer countries.
3 years later that same laptop is on eBay for $500 with almost perfect Linux compatibility though. It’s tough to beat used thinkpads on eBay. I never buy my personal laptops new.
My laptop is a X1 Carbon Gen 3 (released in 2015). Bought it used on ebay and I'm still fairly happy with it. I will say, the lack of hardware transcoding is the biggest pain point these days. When I was still in school and had zoom calls, those were a nightmare and ramped up to a consistent 90% CPU usage. Other than that, Rust compiles times are slow, but nothing else is a huge issue.
Next machine needs to have hardware transcoding though. That's become so important to me. Needing to give up all of my processing power just to be on a video call is awful, but it served well for years for $400.
My last laptop purchase was 11 years ago. I got recall-upgraded to a new laptop 6 years ago. Once amortised, it's a really small price to pay for something I use this much.
If you purchased your laptops with a credit card you should check to see if you have accidental damage protection.
My credit card has that and I've used it to replace a phone with a cracked screen. It was literally a 5 minute phone call to make the claim and all of my money was refunded the next day.
But most of these are meaningless if you don't work full days on the run. Most of us sits in an office with a big monitor and a mouse and keyboard most of the time.
And I don't get the "better productivity" talk either. During the most productive period of my life (by a huge margin, now I understand) I only had a $200 laptop. It was literally sold as "the cheapest laptop you will ever find".
(I give you the noise though, I hate fan noise)
Edit: do hinges ever break? Unless you sit on it, I have never seen this happen even with the cheapest laptops.
- not just a great touchpad, literally the best one in the game undisputed
- all day battery life. And not PC laptops that claim 14 hours of battery but see 5 in reality, I’m talking actually 14 hours of battery in real world use.
I don't live in SF but paid about that much (bit less) for my current laptop. It's more than I've ever paid for a laptop before but I wanted something that would last a good while both in terms of build quality and specs/upgradability. I got a Dell Latitude but the latest Thinkpad T-series was running about the same price with similar specs. I live in the UK.
I have several laptops that are multiple times that. It's common for people earning $200k+ per year to spend 5-10k per year on computing hardware.
My desktop was like $14k new. It has been my daily driver for over 4 years, so less than $300/month (and still going down). That's a rounding error in relation to the money I have earned using it.
My private laptops are around 1000 to 1500. But I also have my desktop PC.
My company laptop is 3k$ and I actually carry that around more often. True I care less about it but I still don't feel like I'm dropping devices while I'm moving.
I dropt my Thinkpad primarily at home when it was sitting next to the couch :')
I charge 1000 Euro per day when I'm consulting. That would be in Berlin. For that money, I need a laptop that is fast and works. I spend most waking hours using it so it also needs to be comfortable to use. So, I value quality and performance.
That being said, my expensive 2017 Macbook Pro broke a few weeks ago and I picked up a very nicely discounted Samsung Galaxy book for about 700 Euro because the only macs available were obsolete and the new ones had 4 week delivery times. It's a 16GB, i5 with a surprisingly decent Iris XE graphics system on a chip thing and 512GB ssd. Nothing fancy but good enough for the money and great value at that price actually.
I put Manjaro on it and was up and running in a few hours. I only had 4 hours to configure it in the evening as I had a customer meeting the next morning and needed a working development environment. So, I was pretty pleased all of that worked out fine. That means that laptop earned itself back in under a day. I even managed to revive some of my 32 bit Steam library and get playable fps (with that intel XE graphics!). And unlike the mac, it does not have thermal throttling issues. It was always unusable for gaming.
I'll probably buy one of the new fancy macs when delivery times improve a bit and when we get some clarity on the inevitable early adopter issues (which bits are going to break this time?). But I'm not in a hurry. This thing works well enough and I'm kind of liking Manjaro so far. Lots of rough edges but nothing I can't deal with. Definitely not for users not comfortable using a command line.
I'd totally spend 3000-4000 Euro on a laptop regardless of the OS if it is good value for money. My last mac book pro was 3500 Euro. Money is not the issue for me when I literally spend a lot of my billable time waiting for this thing to do stuff for minutes on end many times a day and interrupting my flow (which is priceless). But I expect performance for that money as well as a decent keyboard (so definitely not my Macbook Pro) and a nice screen. Apple fixed all of those things with their latest iteration but the configuration I'd want puts me close to 4000-5000 Euro this time. I'm actually considering doing that. But it's a lot of money and Apple tax this time. And the build quality of the last one was terrible, which makes me more hesitant. The worst I've ever seen from Apple. Hence, the cheapo emergency replacement.
So, this laptop looks like a great deal. Twice the memory (or more if you upgrade), ssd, and better CPU than what I picked up for just 700 Euro a few weeks ago. Close to good enough for me. I'd like a proper screen though. Not having retina/HDPI feels like going back to the stone age a bit. Yes, Linux needs a bit of work on that front but Wayland seems capable of this at least. But other than that, not bad. If they do a more expensive version with a better screen, I'd consider getting one.
Finding decent laptops is actually a problem. There are not a lot of premium laptops that are nice enough for my criteria. I don't want a gaming laptop monstrosity that sounds like a vacuum cleaner. I don't care for Thinkpads with a nipple and shitty touchpad. Dell has support issues though their XPS is pretty nice. But I want something premium, with a nice screen, keyboard and touchpad that doesn't feel like a huge compromise. This Samsung is quite nice on this front actually considering the price. The touchpad could be a bit bigger. But it does multi touch and it works (after lots of fiddling with settings). The 1080p screen feels like a huge leap backwards after having used a Retina screen for the last few years. Not loving that.
Heads up to anyone who is running into the right click issue on Ubuntu relating to the framework laptop (right click acts a bit funky), I added the following lines to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf
I as well am very surprised by how many people seem to have had issues with it.
I have used Manjaro and Pop OS on it, and encountered basically 0 issues on either one. The only issue with Pop OS is Gnome’s support for fractional scaling is pretty terrible(at least at the time I tried it).
I use Cinnamon on Manjaro and pretty much everything works flawlessly. The only thing I had any issue with was the fingerprint scanner, though I mostly just gave up on it at the first sign of issue as it wasn’t a feature I really cared about having.
I haven’t had any issues with battery life, and I just carry an Anker portable battery with it so it’s not really a concern anyways, and having that gets me charging for laptop, phone, or anything else that can use USB C power.
Even still, I’ve observed as high as like 8 hours of battery life while being actively used and that’s more than enough for me.
Might be worth noting I don’t primarily use a laptop though. It’s almost exclusively for when I’m out somewhere and an issue comes up or something.
Readit News
Enabling deep sleep works fine; waking from it is impossible. WiFi stops working. The touch pad becomes hypersensitive. I've resorted to turning the whole thing completely off after every use. But the battery still loses power even when the machine is completely powered down.
The machine also freezes if I try to open a jpg or a PDF from the file explorer. Just completely freezes. Fan spins up like crazy, but as I mentioned, I have 64GB of RAM in this thing. It should be able to open a single one-page scanned document from my own scanner. If there's anything wrong with the file, this is the computer that's making the file poorly.
The internet connection also just turns off after about half an hour of use. I have a Belkin dock with Ethernet plugged into it, which is then plugged into my Framework's USB-C port. This dock supports my work Mac all work day every day with no issues at all, so it's not the dock's problem. But the Framework? Internet just stops working after half an hour. And it manages to kill both wired and WiFi when it dies. I can turn them back on, but this is a ridiculous problem to have.
This last point is pretty minor, but the hinges are floppy. The whole screen shakes around when I type on it.
I have no idea how this author's experience is so much better than mine unless they just haven't used it much yet, but I regret absolutely everything about the purchase of this machine and feel like I was sold a bill of goods by all the glowing positive reviews all over the internet.
In the meantime, we've been recommending Ubuntu 21.04 because it does have full support and good stability with all updates applied: https://community.frame.work/t/ubuntu-21-04-on-the-framework...
i mean, for a top-down approach i would probably also choose redhat because they seem to have structures for a streamlined b2b communication and commitment, but on the other hand i absolutely know nobody who uses it apart from the odd researcher and enterprise-it guys.
- As has been noted time and time again, battery life is atrocious. As in unusable for even the travel time required for a three hour flight: factoring in the poor sleep, an hour at the airport, and time on the aircraft the battery is dead. Crazy for 2021/2022 - my eight year old Macbook does better.
- Wifi. The Intel Wifi modules provided with the Framework are very poorly supported in Linux. I spent six hours the other night running additional ethernet drops because I just couldn't stand my workday routinely being interrupted by repeatedly disassociating from my AP (fixed with reboot). Even unloading and reloading the associated kernel modules wouldn't bring it back.
- USB-C acts... Strange. I have two 4K displays using Displayport over USB-C and the Framework repeatedly fails to initialize them from boot. I have to do a strange dance (the steps of which I'm still figuring out) involving powering off the Framework, unplugging/re-plugging everything, and then rebooting until it magically works again.
- Fan. The fan is crazy. I've settled on disabling turbo mode in Linux.
- Build quality. I'm convinced if I drop this thing it's all over.
All in all I'm mad at myself for spending over $3k on a productivity configuration centered around what is pretty much beta hardware. I should have known better.
Anyway, there's hope for some of these issues as they seem to be releasing BIOS updates pretty regularly (currently running 3.07) but even then I need to USB boot to use their EFI update tool. Intel wifi should get better over time and worst case I can swap it out for Atheros or something. That said I think the battery, build, and fan issues are fundamental hardware design choices.
- Re battery: Yup, battery life during sleep sucks, it seems like this is mostly an Intel 11th gen issue as S3 sleep went away and folks on Dell, Lenovo, etc., 11th gen hardware have similar issues.
- Re Fan: it does seem to like to ramp up a bit too much even when components are not really that hot yet.
- Re USB-C: have not used that, so cannot comment
- Re build quality: yes, it is a bit flimsier than I would like (though have definitely used laptops that are way worse), but it is also lighter than competitors that are less so. I am mostly okay with that trade-off, others may not be.
As you say, the company has been responsive and helpful on the community forums in a way the big players never have been, and the BIOS updates are fixing genuine issues and complaints with real release notes. It's not all great for sure, but there's lots of things that are a lot better than competitors.
Andrew noted in a sibling comment what the issue was with the AX210 in Linux. Intel has informed us that the patch is going into kernel 5.17. In retrospect had we known how many issues we'd see with AX210 relative to AX201, we would have gone with the latter as the default option on the DIY Edition. Going forward though, we do expect compatibility and stability to improve (on 5.17 and later).
On the USB-C issues, it would be great to know the model numbers of the displays and cables that are having this issue. We want to continue to build up our library of peripherals that have unknown issues in order to resolve them.
On build quality, we've seen exceeding few field failures on mechanical issues, and a couple of reports of people dropping their system (or as often happens, blaming their cat for this) from high enough to dent a corner of the chassis and then being able resolve that by ordering a replacement cover part from us.
This almost certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with the framework itself. That sounds like a software bug all day long. Something about your OS install is broken or similar.
The only other possibility seems like it'd be if the storage drive is broken. Which could then possibly be why you're experiencing so many other issues, if things like code pages are just failing to load or getting corrupted in the same way your JPG isn't able to load.
But it seems like starting with a fsck or even a re-install seems like a good idea.
I mean... Kind of? It's pretty clear that they're driver issues. Hardware manufacturers have to make in-roads with OS teams to get these things delivered flawlessly, otherwise they have to wait for the community to build fixes. System76 and Lenovo do their best to get ahead of driver issues from what I've seen. I'm assuming a lot of this has to do with the fact that OP is running 21.10 rather than an LTS release.
I just bought the framework and running ubuntu 21.10. I had some of the problems you mentioned but the forum has solutions to many. It’s a new product, and specially with Linux, I knew there would be some problems. You have to be willing to solve these problems o/w you should stay away from buying new hardware from a startup.
IMO, a computer should work decently without needing to tweak the BIOS. If a feature is "experimental" and is likely to cause problems, it should be disabled by default.
Do you have a link to further elaboration and testing on this? Seems strange, and searching the forums is a bit difficult since the two terms get mentioned together a lot.
At the moment, the inevitable battery drain while asleep is quite annoying on modern laptops running Linux :(
In my experience current gen laptops except for certain ThinkPads and Clevos will have support issues in Linux. You get a much better experience using a model a year or two old because the community has had time to address any issues.
The design goal of the Framework wasn't out of the box 100% Linux support, it was reparability. While they encourage Linux development on the platform, what hardware works best to meet their design goal may or may not already have Linux support.
It doesn't, and I very much wish the company and reviewers had made that clearer.
It's what I do. I bought a used LG Gram 17" with 24 GB of RAM about 18 months ago I think. Ultra lightweight (I think it's the lightest 17" laptop that exists) and I've got zero issue under Linux. It may not be as good as the Mac M1 I also own but it is lighter, has more RAM, works fine with Linux and cost me only 400 EUR (granted, that was a good deal back then).
For a laptop running Linux I never buy the latest of the latest.
https://us.starlabs.systems/
WiFi and power draw issues are the biggest two problems they continue to experience.
Also while the screen is very nice it is let down by the resolution. It isn’t high enough to used at 2x scaling but non-integer scaling really hits battery and performance. I feel that was a terrible oversight.
It is a shame as the laptops overall build quality is very good. Hopefully these common issues can be sorted properly as I would be interested in picking one up once it has rocked solid Linux support. Also a higher (or lower) resolution panel option would be nice. After all it is the Framework laptop, surely they should have different panel options :)
On my phone now but there was a bug report I found to match this - apparently 5.14 kernel might work better but I haven’t been able to install it yet from the 3rd party repo.
Update: this is the bug I think: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200977
The rest of the problems persist whether or not it's connected to the dock.
But the dock also doesn't have Ethernet problems with any of my other devices.
I did have to tweak few things mentioned in their community page/forum to get everything working.
Two issues (which hasn't bothered me yet)
edit: formattingWith the RAM exception, my Framework and the author's appear to be apples to apples.
That's why this review confuses me so much; we appear to be using almost the exact same machine.
Which isn't to disregard what you're experiencing, but maybe try updating the firmware? I've seen at least one email they sent out about new firmware that people should probably install if they haven't yet. And maybe try out a liveusb just to see if there's something weird in your installation?
I also thing (again very minor) that the hinge is too loose. If I have it on my lap and type on it the hinge slowly opens up. I wish there was a stiffer hinge.
Otherwise I'm extremely happy with mine!
I use Arch Linux for comparison.
The framework is not the best short-term laptop I've ever had, but it's Solid and if the company sticks around should be the best _long-term_ laptop I've ever owned.
- Deep sleep works fine; wake works fine (with a ~10s delay; that's just linux i think)
- Battery is far better than my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen. (have not really tested, but at a guess, solid 6-8 hours; which for linux is solidly average-to-good i think)
- Never freezes
- Fans are fine (way, way better than my 2018 macbook pro...)
- Network is fine (I had issues at first, but was my fault due to faulty systemd configuration)
- Hinges could be tighter, but no issue with practical use (I'm typing on this on my lap right now and it's fine)
- I use it practically every day for hours at a time.
- I've dropped it at least 2 times -- once from ~3-4 feet high (onto carpet). Totally fine functionally; though the monitor back now has a slight protrusion.
Basically the original post here is n=1 so, i mean... the framework is the most exciting laptop "ideology" frankly ever. And even this first 'beta' version is super solid.I haven't seen a lot of the problems you're seeing, but I definitely have seen this one. Not only is the touch pad hard to use because it's very sensitive, just using the builtin keyboard can accidentally cause the touch pad to be activated. I've read up on ways of fixing this in Linux, but I haven't quite found the trick to make the touch pad behave as well as the Mac touch pad, which is what I'm used to. I haven't even really found a fix yet, so I type very carefully, avoiding resting my hands on the laptop, when I'm not using an external keyboard.
I tend to prefer 1080p for this reason on 12-14" screens. My Thinkpad X13 gen 2 has a 13.3", 1920x1200 screen, windows sets it to 150%, which seems ok, although Ubuntu works well for me without scaling still. The Frame work laptop has an even higher res (2256x1504). I do hear people scaling the fonts and that seems to be a nice solution... I remember from back in the old days that I never really liked the look of this.
What do people think of this? I'm hoping that in the future you can choose the screen (and easily get replacements as well, I hear they are working on that).
Edit: I hope these issues are being addressed by established DE's, I'm assuming they won't be an issue on Canonical's (hypothetical ;)) Flutter based DE that's (obviously ;)) coming and on System76's Rust based new DE for Pop OS [0].
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/08/system76_developing_n...
I run a middling-width monospace font, and I can't quite fit two 80-column windows side by side at 2x without reducing the font size, but if you want that then you want smaller text anyway. (If you run a narrow font it shouldn't be an issue.) Other UI elements are not unreasonably large in my opinion, but YMMV.
That aside, I've been playing around with fractional scaling in Wayland on everything from a 6" Pinephone to 32"@4k in various configurations and it's been mostly painless. Mostly terminal, web browsing, Steam games (latter not on the Pinephone obv). I wouldn't be surprised if there can be issues with xwayland that I'm yet to experience.
Even with Intel graphics? I have stumbled on a number of showstopping bugs and moved back to X, which is also pretty horrible...
Great stability. Close to the edge of progress. And they focus on delivering real unique value on top of what others have created as opposed to reskinning and hacking Gnome.
I’ve never used Fedora but I’m keen on moving over my personal desktop the next time I have a couple of days to mess around with it.
The reason you typically see 1080p or 4k on ultrabooks is because 1080p is how you get the low entry price, and 4k is what sounds better on marketing and looks the best for text-related things (4k is not at all useless - the sharpness it provides to text is noticeable). The balance that QHD provides isn't very desirable in that market usually, although there are exceptions like the Framework laptop or the Surface Laptop 4. Usually those exceptions then also come with more unique aspect ratio displays like 3:2, though, so they aren't exactly 1440p/QHD. But they are in that density.
Resolution is independent of size. Just because it doesn't work perfectly on Linux high DPI is much nicer and easier to read.
The decapsulate on of resolution and size is btw already quite old. Games have this as well were they dynamically change the internal resolution but not the screen resolution.
And you might not care about it but: - text is much smoother - images from DSLR have higher resolution than 4k for ages and you can see the difference
The only arguments against 4k on smaller screens should be power consumption and not scaling issues. But for this we should focus on dynamic refrehsrates and similar power saving mechanism and again NOT complaining about 4k.
MacOS is doing this flawless for years. Windows can do it and under Linux it starts to be usable based on comments of this article.
Because that's really low.
My 14 inch laptop is 1964 rows and I wouldn't really want anything lower than that.
But a 1080p screen would be a no for me. At 2256x1504 on 13.5" screen I think Framework laptop would probably be fine at 100% ie no scaling
To get nice integer scaling one could render at 15360x8640 (16k) which is 5x3072x1728 and 4x3840x2160 but I doubt that's what Wayland is doing. No common graphics card could handle that.
The font hinting relies on the resolution too. By scaling the rendered pixmap 125% the fonts would look bad too. Rendering the fonts in a larger size at the native screen resolution should look better.
I've basically resigned myself to running Sway in 1.5x scale mode, which means that things get rendered at 2x and scaled down. Sway does about as well as I think any desktop environment could be expected to, but it's never going to be the same as rendering at true screen resolution. Alas, running in 1x or 2x and using font settings to handle it breaks down the moment you connect to an external display that really is 1x or 2x.
That said, I love the rest of the laptop (well, maybe except the battery life), so my hope is that at some point we can buy a replacement screen at a more useful resolution, at which point I'll be first in line to buy and install it.
I'm doing this, in particular on a 24" 4k screen. It's true that it may look a bit "weird", in that fonts are huge compared to other UI elements.
However, for me that's a win. I don't care to have huge buttons or what have you, I mostly use shortcuts. So I get nice, sharp fonts and also get to have smaller UI elements which leave more screen space for the text.
* Gnome the desktop -> org.gnome.mutter/experimental-features "scale-monitor-framebuffer". Only integer scales available without this. Following assume that this is enabled.
* gnome apps: work great out of the box
* QT apps: Qt5 requires QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland environment variable to force wayland backend. Enabled by default in Qt6. Used to be quite bad ~1-2 years ago, but is now usable.
* Firefox: MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
* chromium and electron: --ozone-platform=wayland seems fine for chrome, but some electron apps went crazy when moving between windows with different scale. Maybe the electron app bundled an older chrome version. No issues (except less sharp text) when not enabling the experimental wayland backend.
Now we still would need to scale images etc, but that is much less an issue than fractional scaling text or lines etc.
(I just went to check my several-years-old impressions against Darktable’s almost-undocumented config file, and... it no longer seems to have these settings? I’m not sure.)
Unfortunately, the “UI scale” thing seems to be baked into Wayland nowadays; I have no idea how to get Evince to realize that an A4 sheet at 100% should be 210 cm wide whatever my screen resolution and “UI scale”.
Android is still about the only OS with reliable density independence. It's also the only one where things like DPI were an initial part of the UI system, and not something bolted on later.
Windows has been trying to retrofit density independence for nearly a decade now, and it's still pretty hit or miss. Apple didn't bother trying at all, and has been more successful at pretending it works (so scale rendering by whole numbers only, then fractionally scale the resulting image to the actual display size). Web browsers mostly went the Apple route, but we all also regularly expect pinch/zoom scaling to fix any glaring issues anyway and just accept it's kinda janky. Linux... well, Linux is still struggling with the basics of putting stuff on screen (Wayland vs. X11). I wouldn't hold my breath for that ecosystem to get this UX refinement working well anytime soon. Especially not across the many UI widget systems, window managers with differing border decorations, DEs, etc...
I've still had some issues with some applications not scaling their widgets properly, but it's mostly ok.
I’m on PopOS running Wayland with fractional scaling to 200%. It looks fantastic imo and have only had some issues with Guake terminal when plugged in to an external monitor, which I believe may be a Guake-Wayland-specific bug.
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The “for less” bit might be true but is the better specs part?
In a comparison[1] the M1 in a MacBook Air seems to handily beat the Intel Core i7 1165G7 chip on most metrics.
Personally I’m not that CPU bound generally and I like Intel Linux compatibility so I’d still make the trade off.
1. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1165g7-v...
I just couldn't bring myself to use macOS daily, so I punted the laptop change to next year. I wish Apple would just sell their hardware like anyone else, working with OS vendors to get it supported.
I have to use it for work, and it really is a drag compared to Linux.
Apple doesn't provide Linux drivers for their components, but neither does "anyone else", sadly.
But it means that Linux on M1 Macs might actually happen in the near future.
Edit: And Windows doesn't run natively/officially on M1 Macs because Microsoft has a stupid exclusivity deal: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/microsoft-qualcomm-arm-...
Compiling LLVM eats a lot of memory for instance. 16Gb is not really enough to take full advantage of the number of CPUs in a modern laptop.
Is this a laptop for everyone? Not necessarily, but for certain classes of users it's manna from heaven.
No $2000 laptop in 2020 should have only quad core cpus.
The M1 16gb will run circles around the i7-1185g7 (highest spec chip framework sells) compiling llvm with 64gb of ram.
Only using a shitload of idle VMs will have any apparent benefit over M1 MacBook pros.
The cpu is just too limiting for the 64gb of ram argument.
It’s often tempting to dismiss a product that doesn’t meet your own personal use cases but it’s a bit naive.
It’s actually fun to see products get popular that I know I wouldn’t buy myself. It doesn’t make them bad it just makes them not for me right now.
2) If you need 64Gb just sometimes, swapping on M1 MBP is insanely fast.
I understand that upgrading the CPU is not yet quit viable at this point in time for framework but still, it noticable lacks behind the competition when it comes to CPU perf for many (all) tasks.
And things will only get harder with the Ryzen 6000 laptop CPUs coming late this year (on the German marked maybe only early next year).
And similar is true for the competition from newer Intel processors.
Edit
This kinda has me stuck, 16GiB of RAM isn't enough, but the additional perf of the newer CPU is well wanted, but then USB ports being non easily repairable on a T14 is a problem to as I somehow tend to brake them. And only 2 USB-C ports on the T14 are a proble, too.
Oh man if they found a way to have upgradable GPU on a laptop it would be next level! I think it can be done through M.2 slot (the reason why you can get M.2 to PCIe adapters is because M.2 provides a PCIe interface [1], some eGPU solutions use M.2 [2], IIRC it's just a 4 lanes connection through the M.2 connector but better than nothing) - so in order to make this possible on a laptop you would basically have to take small (mobile class) GPUs and solder them on a board that can be inserted in an M.2 slot... I think this is not rocket science but probably those GPUs would be expensive unless the concept really takes off and they are mass produced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2
[2] https://linustechtips.com/topic/831808-m2-x4-egpu-dock-faste...
EDIT - I just remembered that in the past there were some gaming laptops with upgradeable GPU, I think they were made maybe by Asus? And if I remember correctly it was a proprietary connector (but I might be wrong)
EDIT 2 - yes I was thinking about MXM and it was not proprietary, thank you to those who pointed that out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_PCI_Express_Module
EDIT 3 - my proposed idea didn't take cooling into consideration, as correctly pointed out in the comments.
I've got an HP Z2 Mini unit which also uses MXM for its GPU, and is upgradable.
Due to the cooling requirements of a GPU, MXM modules are often pretty thick though, so would probably make the whole laptop thicker.
You also have to consider how the heatsink & heatpipes for a GPU would attach to the GPU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_PCI_Express_Module
However so few people ever bothered to upgrade them, hence why OEMs have moved on.
Even on desktops, every time I came around to upgrade components back in the day, it was about time to upgrade everything.
But the real huge win is replacing broken components easily. That alone is making the Framework extremely tempting for me.
Or make it upgradeable like an external GPU.
Using a mobile GPU chip and putting it into a small external GPU case could be easy.
The only reason why current external GPU cases are so big is that the form factor of GPUs is big and the big power consumption.
Using a mobile GPU could make this into a small cube of 15*15 or so.
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My framework setup already has so much raw power in terms of RAM and CPU. A solid GPU is the next step :-) Would do a GPU pass through setup with virtio/QEMU and a Linux host… if only eGPU setups weren’t so damned expensive! And that’s not even factoring in the sheer lack of availability of 30x series cards.
External GPUs have their own difficulties but I think it’s a less challenging design problem than “configurable GPUs [up to enthusiast/gaming/pro cards]”
You are thinking about MXM [0]
Idea was neat but Regular Joe doesn't upgrade GPU in the laptop. And Non-regular Joes who does demand what it should be cheap and performant.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_PCI_Express_Module
It would be doubly great if the GPU were upgradable as you say.
- The battery life is ATROCIOUS, even after TLP etc. It's about the same as my 4-year-old(!) Thinkpad. Standby battery drain is the worst, easily 20-30% overnight, which I find unacceptable. I can't use this laptop as intended and always have to switch it off completely. Also because of this:
- BIOS 3.06 ships with a bug that could result in the Framework not switching on if the battery is drained to 0%. The new beta BIOS might fix that, but errors like this show this is not a mature product.
- There are no stable LVFS firmware upgrades for Linux yet and some users also report overwritten bootloaders after upgrading. Linux compatibility is definitely not there yet.
- Many small annoyances on Linux: Fingerprint reader is not working out of the box, screen tearing, Bluetooth regressions etc. on certain kernels.
- My Framework didn't turn on for almost 2 weeks. I tried different RAM/SSDs to no avail... then, it suddenly worked again with the original components. No problems after that, very strange.
- The speakers are worse than the one in my smartphone. On most surfaces it sounds muffled and just not right.
- My CPU fan made strange noises. I could fix that thanks to the great repairability though.
- The fan can get very loud. Fortunately, it happens very rarely. Most of the time it's silent when browsing the internet or doing web dev work.
- Build quality is clearly a step down from my old Thinkpad X1 Yoga. The hinge doesn't feel as strong, some keys are mushy/creaking and I'm skeptical my Framework will survive as many falls as my old laptop.
Don't get me wrong: it's impressive for a first iteration product and a lot of modern laptops can't compete with it (despite the Framework being far more extensible). It ticks many boxes and offers a package that is hard to find these days (Lenovo & Co. seem to love soldered-on RAM, decreased keyboard travel, fewer ports).
After many glowing reviews I just expected a bit more. Coming from a 4-yo premium Thinkpad I'm not sure the Framework is an upgrade. It's more fragile, (currently) has worse Linux support & no next-day business support. I would definitely wait for the next generation of laptops.
We do strongly recommend updating to 3.07. The issue in 3.06 was a regression that we've released 3.07 to resolve. We'll be removing the Beta label on the release shortly since we've seen large update on the release.
I agree we have work to do collaborating with Linux distro maintainers to ensure compatibility out of the box. We've been able to do that with the team at Fedora and Fedora 35 has basically complete support and solid stability: https://community.frame.work/t/fedora-linux-35-on-the-framew...
Beyond that, we very much appreciate the feedback. We're always looking to improve what we're building, and real user feedback helps us do that.
> One of the initial caveats with installing Ubuntu is that deep sleep and hibernate are not enabled by default. Deep sleep is easy to enable. Hibernate takes a bit more effort, but it’s straightforward. Once configured it works like a charm. I noticed about a 2% drain in 3 days of hibernation. If this power loss is linear, it can go for weeks in hibernation.
I guess that’s the “modern standby” that is replacing s3 sleep these days.
It's horrible.
Don't buy the Framework as your main laptop if you plan to travel/use it unplugged a lot - I consider it a broken device for this intended usage. Put down the lid overnight and you'll have around 2-4h SOT left (and that's with a fully charged brand-new battery).
No other business laptop in the last 15 years felt so limiting in this regard, battery life is a constant worry. My Framework won't leave the dock and I'll hope manufacturers close the gap to the M1 soon (I don't care about raw power, but energy efficiency).
> - There are no stable LVFS firmware upgrades for Linux yet and some users also report overwritten bootloaders after upgrading. Linux compatibility is definitely not there yet.
At the moment, you can't upgrade BIOS on Linux systems without using Windows which is a major shortcoming. No LVFS support is a big miss right now for Linux users
I know expensive laptops are the norm in SF, but does anyone else pay that much for laptops they may drop or looked at any time?
(My current workhorse is a T-series thinkpad I got for free)
So for me the £2000+ I paid for my laptop to max it out to the extreme is money well spent. Did I mention it's a taxable expense?
This is about snappiness only, I have no trouble finding workloads stressing this old i5 (e.g. 2k/4k videos), where an M1 would fly through. Personally, I just think snappiness alone is a bit forced argument to spent 2k$.
But then again, I would never buy those when just released.
Next machine needs to have hardware transcoding though. That's become so important to me. Needing to give up all of my processing power just to be on a video call is awful, but it served well for years for $400.
Since it's a business expense, it's even cheaper.
I dropped it 4 days after purchase.
My next laptop was $2000.
I dropped it a few months after purchase.
I don't live in SF. So I guess the answer to your question is yes.
My credit card has that and I've used it to replace a phone with a cracked screen. It was literally a 5 minute phone call to make the claim and all of my money was refunded the next day.
- great touchpad (and gestures)
- all day battery
- no noise at all (optional but for me a big plus)
- hinge that stands the test of time
- aluminum (of very resistant) body
i'll buy a laptop that checks these off under $1600, but so far m1 air is the only one I found, and it's cheaper than that
And I don't get the "better productivity" talk either. During the most productive period of my life (by a huge margin, now I understand) I only had a $200 laptop. It was literally sold as "the cheapest laptop you will ever find".
(I give you the noise though, I hate fan noise)
Edit: do hinges ever break? Unless you sit on it, I have never seen this happen even with the cheapest laptops.
- not just a great touchpad, literally the best one in the game undisputed
- all day battery life. And not PC laptops that claim 14 hours of battery but see 5 in reality, I’m talking actually 14 hours of battery in real world use.
My desktop was like $14k new. It has been my daily driver for over 4 years, so less than $300/month (and still going down). That's a rounding error in relation to the money I have earned using it.
My company laptop is 3k$ and I actually carry that around more often. True I care less about it but I still don't feel like I'm dropping devices while I'm moving.
I dropt my Thinkpad primarily at home when it was sitting next to the couch :')
However getting accidental damage protection, like from Lenovo, does help the peace of mind.
I mean, I still use a laptop in the evenings, but for work a desktop is to me a must.
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That being said, my expensive 2017 Macbook Pro broke a few weeks ago and I picked up a very nicely discounted Samsung Galaxy book for about 700 Euro because the only macs available were obsolete and the new ones had 4 week delivery times. It's a 16GB, i5 with a surprisingly decent Iris XE graphics system on a chip thing and 512GB ssd. Nothing fancy but good enough for the money and great value at that price actually.
I put Manjaro on it and was up and running in a few hours. I only had 4 hours to configure it in the evening as I had a customer meeting the next morning and needed a working development environment. So, I was pretty pleased all of that worked out fine. That means that laptop earned itself back in under a day. I even managed to revive some of my 32 bit Steam library and get playable fps (with that intel XE graphics!). And unlike the mac, it does not have thermal throttling issues. It was always unusable for gaming.
I'll probably buy one of the new fancy macs when delivery times improve a bit and when we get some clarity on the inevitable early adopter issues (which bits are going to break this time?). But I'm not in a hurry. This thing works well enough and I'm kind of liking Manjaro so far. Lots of rough edges but nothing I can't deal with. Definitely not for users not comfortable using a command line.
I'd totally spend 3000-4000 Euro on a laptop regardless of the OS if it is good value for money. My last mac book pro was 3500 Euro. Money is not the issue for me when I literally spend a lot of my billable time waiting for this thing to do stuff for minutes on end many times a day and interrupting my flow (which is priceless). But I expect performance for that money as well as a decent keyboard (so definitely not my Macbook Pro) and a nice screen. Apple fixed all of those things with their latest iteration but the configuration I'd want puts me close to 4000-5000 Euro this time. I'm actually considering doing that. But it's a lot of money and Apple tax this time. And the build quality of the last one was terrible, which makes me more hesitant. The worst I've ever seen from Apple. Hence, the cheapo emergency replacement.
So, this laptop looks like a great deal. Twice the memory (or more if you upgrade), ssd, and better CPU than what I picked up for just 700 Euro a few weeks ago. Close to good enough for me. I'd like a proper screen though. Not having retina/HDPI feels like going back to the stone age a bit. Yes, Linux needs a bit of work on that front but Wayland seems capable of this at least. But other than that, not bad. If they do a more expensive version with a better screen, I'd consider getting one.
Finding decent laptops is actually a problem. There are not a lot of premium laptops that are nice enough for my criteria. I don't want a gaming laptop monstrosity that sounds like a vacuum cleaner. I don't care for Thinkpads with a nipple and shitty touchpad. Dell has support issues though their XPS is pretty nice. But I want something premium, with a nice screen, keyboard and touchpad that doesn't feel like a huge compromise. This Samsung is quite nice on this front actually considering the price. The touchpad could be a bit bigger. But it does multi touch and it works (after lots of fiddling with settings). The 1080p screen feels like a huge leap backwards after having used a Retina screen for the last few years. Not loving that.
Section "InputClass"
EndSectionThis fixed the issue for me. Your mileage may vary though.
Things I did:
- Enabled fractional scaling to use it at 150%
- Changed suspend from s2idle to deep, archwiki mentions that: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Framework_Laptop
One small thing I loved about the laptop was how I was able to (albeit slowly) charge it with a pixel 3 charger.
I have used Manjaro and Pop OS on it, and encountered basically 0 issues on either one. The only issue with Pop OS is Gnome’s support for fractional scaling is pretty terrible(at least at the time I tried it).
I use Cinnamon on Manjaro and pretty much everything works flawlessly. The only thing I had any issue with was the fingerprint scanner, though I mostly just gave up on it at the first sign of issue as it wasn’t a feature I really cared about having.
I haven’t had any issues with battery life, and I just carry an Anker portable battery with it so it’s not really a concern anyways, and having that gets me charging for laptop, phone, or anything else that can use USB C power.
Even still, I’ve observed as high as like 8 hours of battery life while being actively used and that’s more than enough for me.
Might be worth noting I don’t primarily use a laptop though. It’s almost exclusively for when I’m out somewhere and an issue comes up or something.