Framework Laptop with Ubuntu Review

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.

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'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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

Update: this is the bug I think: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200977

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)

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.

I’ve been using Fedora 35 with Wayland and fractional scaling set to 150% on my Framework laptop and it works great for me.

I don't understand why 1440p hasn't become the standard on laptops. Its always 1080p or 4K which is useless on such a small display.

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.

I've run Gnome+Wayland at 125% on a 32" 4k screen for over a year and noticed no issues. But that is just a sample size of 1.

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

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 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.

After using a dead-quiet laptop for a few weeks, it's hard even to think about Intel airplane+heater offerings.

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.

he was not talking only about CPU but about extensibility!

These GPUs use an MXM connector, not M.2.

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

They did in the past made laptops with upgradable GPU, I have one Asus that still is working (from 2009).

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.

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.

Just use an external GPU?

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.

Would you settle for an external eGPU over USBC?

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]”

> were some gaming laptops with upgradeable GPU

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

I will buy a Framework laptop in a heartbeat if they came with RTX GPUs.

It would be doubly great if the GPU were upgradable as you say.

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.

> Standby battery drain is the worst, easily 20-30% overnight, which I find unacceptable.

I guess that’s the “modern standby” that is replacing s3 sleep these days.

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 paid $2000 for my laptop, and not a day goes by that I'm not grateful to past-me for that decision. Having a snappy machine is immensely pleasant.

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.

I’ll bet your T-series cost at least $1600 2021 dollars when it was 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.

Since it's a business expense, it's even cheaper.

I never paid more than $400, but I also use Linux and don't play games or edit video, so I never really felt the need for a modern powerful computer.

My last laptop was $3500.

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.

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.

Could you reach out to our support team on the touchpad issue: https://frame.work/support#contact_support

We've finally root caused physical clicks not registering on some units, and found that it was a batch of dome switches with a coating that was more likely to corrode over time depending on environmental conditions. We've recently switched coatings to prevent this from happening in the future, and we're also sending replacement parts to folks who write in with this issue. One of the benefits of this product being easy to repair is that we can just send you a replacement module instead of needing to take your system back or send you a full system!

Seconding your experience, except my battery life has been quite good somehow. I’m not sure if that’s due to one of the settings I changed when setting it up, OS (I’m using Pop!_OS), or just luck of the draw.

My touchpad will also just stop clicking sometimes. It’s usually an exercise of finding the right spot to push to reset the hardware clicker itself. I have the fix that Framework sent out about a loose touchpad cable, so it shouldn’t be that. It also occasionally will just stop registering the mouse at all, either from the touchpad or from an external mouse. Closing the lid and reopening it will fix this.

Fractional scaling was a little dicey, but I found 150% hits the sweet spot for me, I don’t have any issues aside from some occasional jagged screen regions while scrolling, which I don’t mind.

Overall, I’ve been happy with mine. It’s not perfect, and it occasionally hiccups in weird ways (like the mouse thing), but that was my expectation going in. As a daily driver and dev machine, it works well and I would recommend the DIY edition to anyone with a little tolerance for issues in their laptop.

There was a touchpad fix that they mailed out to people a while back. Maybe that’s related to your problem? I never applied it because mine seems to be fine.

Yes it works https://youtu.be/6NVkToI-vBI

Yep it works well. As is usual with linux, it took a frustrating day or two to set up but I now play Steam windows games with Proton on NixOS using an NVidia eGPU. I'm using X, not wayland though, but it works both on external displays and on the Framework's "internal" display.

It's an Intel Xe GPU, so it's probably integral to the CPU package.