Framework Laptop with Ubuntu Review
luisartola.com
luisartola.com
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.
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.
I had touchpad issues but there was a fix for it in the forums
With windows (I setup dual boot) everything works done. I had to tinker with Linux for everything to work how I wanted it. Which is what I’ve had to do with other Linux desktops too
I'd love to get off the apple train, but I can't go back after the battery life on my M1.. I can do two full 8 hour workdays without a charger on this thing... With VMs..
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.
The main issues are just difficulty connecting to networks. When connected it usually works fine, sometimes DNS will randomly fail though.
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.
Otherwise I'm extremely happy with mine!
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.
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.
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.
I agree with the idea that it _should_ work decently without - but as of now, that is not the status quo.
That said this is also the very first model of a device that’s intended to be DIY repairable…tweaking some BIOS settings shouldn’t be scary for someone buying what is effectively the beta version of a laptop that comes with a screwdriver so you can change out its parts.
At the moment, the inevitable battery drain while asleep is quite annoying on modern laptops running Linux :(
- 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.
I understand the sleep issues but battery life is miserable generally - the sleep issues only exacerbate an already pretty-much-terrible situation. Fortunately I don't really need significant battery life but if I did I'd be looking to unload this thing at this point.
Anecdotally, my battery life is plenty good when actually using it (I've yet to feel like I need to reach for the charger at all unless I started very low), but everyone's use case is different.
Which makes me wonder - maybe the Intel wifi board has a lot of problems but is still the best Linux option...
And I'm curious to know which WiFi chipset you would rather they have used, as most alternatives either have worse Linux support or aren't as advanced as Intel's. Would you rather they used Broadcom, The bane of WiFi and Linux?
That's what my last sentence was trying to express. Something can be shitty and also the best option.
I’m not trying to give Framework (or any other laptop maker) a free pass here, just saying that it’s not a unique problem to this laptop.
One of the benefits that a company like Framework has is that they don't have to support everything. They can be like Apple and tailor their hardware choices to the ones best supported by the software.
To me, Asahi Linux is the most exciting thing going on in Linux-land right now. They have a very small number of hardware configurations to support. In theory, they should be able to get it really dialed in and polished to the point where it just works. I don't care if they go for KDE or Gnome, SystemD or SysVinit, or anything else in particular. If it works right from the start and is extraordinarily stable, I'll learn to love the choices they make.
Asahi is more of a project for driver and related development and upstreaming it. They do plan to release a distro, but the current plan is for it to just be Arch with the bleeding edge of their work applied (so perhaps not the “dialed-in” you’re looking for since Arch is far from that). IMO, Asahi is just solving the same issue with anything else: lack of drivers for some hardware. It just so happens that the hardware is very specific and popular. My feeling is that I don’t want to invest in hardware whose manufacturer is unwilling to invest at all in my use-case (Linux).
Do you want open computing?
Or Apple?
Pick one.
I’m really tired of the IT community that just wants high paying jobs but none of the skills that earn them.
As a hardware designer; do better, software “engineers”.
If the community is going to claim the title, it damn well better start engineering better than these awful websites and hacky operating system kernels and GUIs that glitch.
Or stfu over others efforts which are a bit beyond memorizing textbook math and recalling them via your text editor with algorithmic help.
Look at all the non-contributors certain they can do better.
Laptops are sold as an appliance for the most part, they have to own it’s quality.
Actually more than that, this should first be an excellent laptop and then the repairability and customisable it should be layered on top of that without compromising it (too much), as opposed to the other way around.
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.
EDIT: Speaking of startups, if you didn't know already you have a lot of "street cred" out there. When wrapping an in-person presentation or meeting many of the questions I get are about my Framework!
Where should I report on the displays and cables with the USB-C issues?
Regarding drops I've actually never dropped a laptop in the > 20 years I've had them. So kind of a non-concern but the comment was referring to the general "feel" which may not really mean anything outside of perception.
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.
The reviewers definitely need to do a better job of thorough testing before making claims. But in my experience it is common for things to inexplicably not work when before they did and vice versa in Linux with no good explanation as to why. It's part of the reason why "the year of the Linux desktop" is always next year IMO.
As for Framework themselves, I checked the product page and this is all they had to say about Linux support:
"Available in configurations with Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro, we’ve also tested for compatibility with common Linux distributions and will be publishing guides on using them."
I don't see those guides in the support section yet so it seems they don't support them yet. If a vendor doesn't explicitly list an OS as supported then I don't consider it supported. So like 99% of Linux situations I would assume YMMV.
You could buy some laptops, install a decent distro and be on your way. Nowadays sleep issues are affecting most recent CPUs, I had a pretty poor experience on any laptop. I picked a Surface 2 because there was a community effort (linux-surface) and I still have the same sleep / freezing issues I had on day one, despite my model being covered in green checkmarks on the support page of the project.
Unfortunately OSS is people working for free in their spare time and you can't expect much. Honestly I wish a company would come up and make a paid linux distro with proper support for one model.
I'd be happy to pay for an operative system that works and it's not Mac OS or Windows, as they both suck pretty bad in their latest iterations.
My ideal UX is the configuration of KDE I've used for years or my Sway setup, not window managers without tiling support and limited proprietary file managers which are designed for noobs.
The majority of Linux dev work is actually done by paid devs at tech companies who contribute to Linux. Its been this way for years now. The reason it doesn't seem that way is because almost all of that contribution is going to enterprise code with the rest going to supporting whatever technologies those companies directly use. Google isn't spending time on making x86 laptop sleep states work, they are improving Android. Same with Amazon, they are contributing code that makes Linux more useful in AWS.
The consumer side is much much worse supported than the enterprise side. And there are actually paid versions of Linux that have paid development and support behind them. But again, it isn't aimed at PCs so PC specific features aren't getting fixed.
The only software company I can think of that is putting serious resources behind improving Linux on the PC is Valve.
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.
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 :)
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)
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?
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.
They just freeze the system if I try to open them from the file explorer.
I've not seen anything like this before.
I do, and this enables me to delete and reinstall any Linux version without changing my home directory.
It seems reinstalling the operating system is the first thing you should try.
Try `pv /dev/nvme0n1 > /dev/null` (or just cat, but pv will give you a nice progress bar if you install it). If that errors out or your machine freezes, you have a storage problem and probably need to replace your SSD. If that works, try booting in single user mode or from a USB boot drive and running fsck.
You can also try SSHing in from another machine while trying to open the file locally. If the SSH session dies instantly, it's probably a kernel panic. If it survives, you can look at logs and top see what happened (maybe the issue is the desktop environment locks up?)
Sleep issues, the dock stuff, those sound like legitimate driver/support issues that would affect anyone. But opening PDFs crashing your machine really sounds like either your hardware or install is specifically broken and needs fixing, or you're running into a really weird bug that is not hardware-specific.
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...
As a general matter, I have seen this kind of sentiment a lot, and I don't think it's particularly helpful. This subthread OP clearly feels let down and potentially betrayed. Why would you respond by suggesting that the conversation goes private onto a forum Framework controls? Shifting the forum of the discussion to a place where one party has more power seems inherently questionable.
I say that even though I have no reason to believe you all would do anything inappropriate, and my general view of your project is highly positive.
At this point, when a client of mine that is technically litterate has such a bad experience, I pay them a visit.
They would probably learn a ton by having the setup at hand.
AFAIK it will not go private, it will still be available for everyone to follow. HN is not exactly convenient place for user support (unless it's Google or Apple).
Given all the very positive press out there about Framework products, and the forum where this conversation is happening, I would have expected an answer more along the lines of: "your experience is unacceptable to us. Let us send you a box to return the laptop for an exchange or a full refund."
I realize that this might be more appropriate for a private communication with he customer, rather than a public HN post. Maybe you've done that. I have no way of knowing. But from what I can see, it seems like OP is being told that its on him to figure out how to fix a laptop that he just paid $1,600(?) for and that, from the sound of it, never worked properly.
I get that this product is aimed at folks who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. But I would not have expected that to mean a customer would be relegated to the forums to address such major issues. The fact that some of your employees may help him do this on the forums is very cold comfort. It is still going to burn up a lot of the customer's time.
Edit -- Just to refine my thoughts here: it's not a bad thing that Framework has an active forum that can help a customer resolve issues like this, nor is it a bad thing to invite a customer to participate there if they want to. On the contrary: that's all to the good. At the same time, though, I'd expect a company like Framework to evince a greater sense of their own ownership of the customer's problems, rather than exclusively suggesting ways that the customer can find a fix for themselves.
But that's kind of framework's go to market: an open ecosystem. Which includes troubleshooting in public so other users can see what the problem and solution is. Vs. the magic bullet being locked in some internal KB. It also would do no good to run through troubleshooting here, clogging up a thread on HN trying to solve one users issue.
So - you say: immediately return the laptop! I say: nothing he's described immediately indicates a hardware problem; it mostly looks like software configuration issues. So why on earth would they replace the hardware as step 1?
I don't mean to tell them exactly how they should communicate with their customers, but communicating some sense of ownership over the problem would have gone a long way.
Of course, it's also entirely possible that I'm just not the target market for these laptops. I certainly have no problem with fixing my own tech problems as a general matter, but I wouldn't want that to be my only recourse on my daily driver. If that's just not what Framework is selling, then I'm glad they've communicated that!
But time is the main reason I bought the machine in the first place. Reviews about Ubuntu support were glowing. Linux support was touted in the website significantly.
I'm really not trying to do anything extraordinary with the machine, so I thought it would be better just to spend the money and get one that works than it has been trying to do things like run Lubuntu on my old Chromebook Pixel.
I'm doing basic things like research things in a web browser, scan documents with xsane, or occasionally record audio in Audacity. I'm not trying to do anything extraordinary or complicated.
I just wanted a machine that would do those things without tracking me everywhere (Windows) and where I could fix pieces rather than having to replace the whole device if something broke or wore out.
I paid more than twice as much as I ever have for a computer so that I would NOT have to help you develop the product, do quality control, or troubleshoot it. I wanted it to be ready to use for my run-of-the-mill needs.
And it wasn't, and that's why I wrote this review here.
If time is your valuable commodity then buying a first gen "revolutionary" product was never going to be a good move. In your case, buying "known good" was the direction you should have gone and let others cut themselves and bleed out on the edge. Sorry for your bad experience, chalk it up to lessons learned. It's ever the case with tech: the vision is far, far ahead of reality.
It doesn't sound ridiculous to me that someone might decide to target the Linux market really well even though others haven't. I had hoped that was what had happened. Maybe I wanted to believe it more than I should have believed it.
But that's the motivation behind my posting here, to save anyone from making the same mistake.
I have a $1700 paperweight. Oh well. But that doesn't mean I want anyone else to make the same mistake.
TBH, then I think you should have bought an Apple or Windows computer, and put up with whatever the downsides of such things are (such as the tracking you mention).
Not saying that the extremely poor performance you describe is your fault or that the manufacturer should be absolved or anything, just that this is precisely the point of paying for conventional computers and putting up with their bullshit (real or perceived).
I'm glad yours does; that does sound convenient!
Truly best of both worlds in my experience- incredible battery life and everything ‘just works’ for normal workflows on the MacBook, and can ssh into the headless Ubuntu box directly or from anywhere with internet. Depending on your dev needs, this anecdote may be useful: I’ve exclusively used vim and VS Code with a remote server extension to target the Ubuntu box for builds and I haven’t touched the setup for 6-8 months.
Also, if you’re willing to spend some time learning, getting into Nix ends up saving time in the long run as your nix shell definitions should provide replicable user / build environments on top of whatever Linux flavor you happen to be running at the time, for the headless dev box
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 believe it's the other way around: no other Linux distribution has a higher overlap with the target market of the Framework Laptop than Fedora.
Because unlike Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation has been specifically design for developers, hobbyists, and early adopters[1].
Personally, I only recommend and install Ubuntu for non-technical people, who don't need or care about always having the most modern OS features.
You either get stuff sooner or get stuff more stable, you can't have 'rock solid' stuff sooner.
Things like mock and fedpkg make modifying upstream/bundling your own stuff up super easy. Then add in COPR (like PPAs) and it's a feedback-loop friendly setup
Its where the new fun stuff goes first... not so new that it will bite you, but still new enough to be fun to play with. That seems perfectly in line with the marketing I see from framework.
but ime it is unpopular for personal use esp. in the enthusiast/dev/ops/hacker demographic that i consider to be a sizeable portion of the framework target market.
public opinion here also seems to suggest that my experience is less trustworthy than your feeling and tbh i mostly don't care wich flavor of unix is running my wm and browser.
Nice to hear that Framework plays well with Fedora, it will definitely be the next laptop I buy (if they ever start shipping to Norway).
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 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.
- 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)
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.
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.
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/how-fractional-scaling-works-i...
For scaling 125%, the client windows are rendered at 2x their size and sampled down. On the parent's system, a full-screen window would be rendered at 6144x3456 and scaled down to 3840x2160 (0.625%).
This gives a blurry result and is taxing on the graphics chip.
Qt apps and Firefox support scaling themselves which gives a much crisper result for fonts and line-art.
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.
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.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/193723/scaling-all...
If somebody understands the situation better on MacOS I'd be interested, but based on my experience, Windows is the only OS that gets this as close as possible to right. It's a single setting that affects all applications and I can set monitors independently and it will scale on the fly (even if it does look a little weird as you drag an app across and it dynamically shifts)
Every now and then I'll come across a app that doesn't quite deal with high DPI scaling correctly, but it is the exception to the rule.
Linux also works pretty well, but as with everything Linux, it's almost always "it depends and well, not quite" (not usually multi-monitor aware, lots of per app settings)
I'm not sure what you mean. My MacOS does the scaling and it looks good.
How is MacOS scaling different?
It renders a high-resolution image to a buffer, and then scales that when rendering to the actual screen buffer. The buffer image is at least as large as the actual screen buffer.
You can see for yourself that it isn't changing the hardware resolution of external monitors when scaling by taking a look at the actual resolution on your monitors OSD if it has done. It'll always be the native resolution.
Non-integer scaling (of a pixel source, vectors are different but not relevant here) either requires blending or crisp unequal-sizing artifacts.
If I tried all the possible scalings for my external monitor, the grey line around each window, to give a specific example of, is always a crisp physical one-pixel wide.
macOS creates a buffer to render to that is the same size as the physical output you're choosing to use, and is able to render with pixel precision in that buffer.
However, it is unclear to me what are the scaling ratios relative to the native resolution in your examples. In this article for Sierra you seem to be only able to pick integer factors: https://www.eizoglobal.com/support/compatibility/dpi_scaling...
Maybe? But that's ancient history.
I don't know what the ratios are - the UI doesn't expose them.
But this is all a bit arbitrary - I think the macOS API deals with an abstract 'points' unit.
First of all, DPI is not the metric we're interested in. That is a unit for print quality, and it has no relevance for an OS, for Photoshop, or anything we do on a screen. The operating system does not know how big your screen is. Inches nor dots are relevant; only pixels are. It would be more accurate to talk about the ratio of monitor pixels to apparent pixels. I guess Microsoft finally got the memo in Windows 11 (or was it 10?) and changed to percentages.
In MacOS, a 4K monitor set to 1920x1080 will still be 3840x2160, but it displays 4 pixels for every 1 apparent pixel. Everything scales correctly, except for legacy applications. The UI elements, text, etc. appear to be a sharper version of 1080p. In Windows land, this is the same thing as "200%." As far as I can tell, Windows does the same thing but uses scaling percentages instead of apparent resolution.
To go deeper into nitpicking, DPI is not even that misleading, if you take "inch" in DPI to be equal to 72 points as used in font sizes. Then a 72pt font on the screen with DPI X will be rendered with height of X pixels.
And yes, the OS does in fact know how big your screen is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identificatio...
There is a reason macbooks, still the gold standard for hi dpi rendering, have never had 4k panels.
Speak for yourself. The 4k display in my XPS is my favorite output device I have ever owned. I wish my rMBP had that kind of pixel density.
There have been plenty of counter examples.
Anyway, my smartphone has 1000x2000 resolution on a 6" display. The text looks perfect.
They can make very high resolution displays with very efficient energy consumption.
Feel free not to need it but my DSLR and my smartphone both take 4k and higher resolution pictures for years.
Yes I want such a display on my 14" laptop.
I do like the MacBook pro screen and it's much better than 1080p. True.
Because that's really low.
My 14 inch laptop is 1964 rows and I wouldn't really want anything lower than that.
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.
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've still had some issues with some applications not scaling their widgets properly, but it's mostly ok.
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.
* 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.
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...
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”.
Modern CSS is quite close to Turing complete, so an entirely constraint-driven design (which is what's needed when more than one unit is being chosen by the user) ought to be feasible. You need at least "real world units" for stuff like the minimum size of touch targets, and "angular units" (like CSS pixels) for the general scaling of widgets. Plus it would be nice to add a separate scaling factor for text, since users differ widely in what they find most readable. So that makes for three independent settings, in the general case.
That touch targets need absolute lengths is a good point.
> So that makes for three independent settings, in the general case.
Yes, and you’ll notice that’s what Darktable does (or did) :) I’m not unsympathetic, just have never seen it done in a moderately complex situation.
> Modern CSS is quite close to Turing complete, so an entirely constraint-driven design (which is what's needed when more than one unit is being chosen by the user) ought to be feasible.
I suspect it’s not a question of theoretical expressive power so much as ergonomics: allowing easy description of (what people think about as) simple things. It probably doesn’t have to be precisely; if a full constraint-based / linear programming approach[1] is the way to go, I expect designers will adapt, it’s just that last I checked those could be quite tricky to use: small changes could lead to drastic rearrangements of the layout, and as soon as you try to add a couple of breakpoints the whole thing becomes NP-complete.
It’s like, say, LR(k) parsers. LR(k) parsers are nice, fast, and good at expressing our intuitions about ambiguity (unlike ordered choice). They are expressive enough for almost anything you might want to say. But nobody really wants to work with them, the failures are tricky and hard to predict, and they lack many things you want for modularity (say, closure under unions).
It seems to me that the situation with truly resolution-independent layouts is similar in this respect: we can technically do them, to some extent, but they are a pain, so nobody does. And it’s not so much a problem of finding the perfect language as a problem of figuring out what it is that we want to say that seems so simple in our heads.
Sure, that's a given with the constraint satisfaction approach but NP-complete problems work just fine when N is small enough.
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...
The problem, as usual, is getting the apps to actually use it.
(This doesn't handle multi-monitor setups well, since font size would be the same for them all. But multiple monitors were not exactly common back then.)
WM_DPICHANGED is a late addition, yes, but it's only necessary for the apps to dynamically reflow if the user changes that setting. Before it showed up, you'd have to restart the app for it to register the new value - but that does not preclude DPI independence as such.
The real problem was that almost everything in Win32 outside of CreateDialog uses device pixels to position. You were supposed to use GetDialogBaseUnits and/or MapDialogRect manually to get the correct values, and very few apps did.
For another early example, Visual Basic (VB6, pre-.NET, so we're talking 1998) measured everything in twips.
Not entirely. The font size can still be changed independently of the DPI, and not everything should be scaled as a result. Things like dividing lines and padding probably shouldn't be scaled when the font size is increased.
You still need a distinct DIP value independent of scaled font size. So the value of 'dp' vs. 'sp' in Android terms, which it looks like Windows' now also has that distinction.
And yeah this is ignoring that things like the visual winforms tool in Visual Studio really just wanted to operate in fixed positions, and just getting things to work when the window was resized wasn't always intuitive or obvious. So even if the APIs were there, the ecosystem definitely didn't care about it and Microsoft's own tools definitely didn't help.
Fixed layouts is orthogonal to all that - so long as those fixed layouts are defined in DPI-independent units, they will scale just fine. FWIW in WinForms (and also Delphi VCL, where this originated) you'd normally use anchors to design layouts that scale when the window is resized. Granted, it's nowhere near as flexible as proper layout containers - which WinForms (2.0+) also has, and which the visual form designer also supports, although it can be a pain to work with them.
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.
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...
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.
I’m sure there are other 'workstation-ish' jobs that people would happily run on their laptop if it had > 16Gb memory. 64Gb is quite the leap.
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.
I have an M1 MBP and an 1185g7 based Linux laptop. Single core benchmarks, the i7 comes out slightly ahead. Multi core benchmarks, the M1 comes out slightly ahead. There are no circles being run around in performance - only in battery efficiency. For day to day developer usage, testing things literally side by side, I find absolutely no discernible difference in speed.
The M1 does win for battery life, but the battery still lasts for a full work day in my i7 laptop. Honestly at home I always reach for the Linux laptop, because I don't really need the battery life. But for going out and about away from power, the M1 MBP has advantages. Sadly the software (personally) lets it down, I'd probably use the MBP more if it has better Linux support in the future.
It will run circles around the 1185g7 compiling large codebases.
Passmarks across hundreds of benches show a 25% single and 40% multithreaded performance boost over the 1185g7.
I’ve got an i9 8/16 laptop chip and the 13” M1 is trading blows with my laptop despite 2-3x the thermal headroom and considerably less cores/threads across all workloads.
The i9 Apple laptops were notorious for not having a cooling system that could match the heat output of the CPU & throttling almost instantly.
Modern Intel laptop CPUs are no where near the performance / W of the M1, but they are considerably better than those that Apple stuffed into their laptops a few years ago with inadequate cooling I believe.
The only problem with the first generation framework laptop is intel’s quad core CPU because of thermal and power problems associated with their process nodes.
Hex core is really the lowest I will go now for anything over $1000. If this was a Ryzen 5800u, I’d have bought one already.
FWIW, Cinebench multi-core benchmark is around 20% faster for me on the M1.
[0]: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100076/0100/a64-inst...
Many of us spend substantial periods of time writing up the technical documentation in Confluence or use JIRA. Confluence alone loads approximately 22Mb of mangled and compacted JavaScript for each open page in a separate browser tab.
Before M1, Confluence and JIRA were the single most source of a sustained battery drain, irrespective of the browser. On M1 based laptops, the battery impact is so negligible that it can be considered non-existent. How much of this subjected experience can be attributed just to the the ARM 8.3 JavaScript hardware acceleration is an interesting question as the JavaScript browser performance on Intel CPU's has also been affected by Spectre and Meltdown mitigations in the CPU microcode.
LLVM builds eat memory in my experience & end up swapping if you don’t play games with the build system to reduce the parallelism of memory intensive parts of the build.
If you’ve got a VM or two sitting around then obviously that makes things worse.
2) If you need 64Gb just sometimes, swapping on M1 MBP is insanely fast.
Also, you want to ignore 400 Gb/s provided by Apple's 64Gb memory, but... you know.
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.
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.
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-...
Apple not actively hindering Asahi Linux isn't exactly a great accomplishment. They chose not to write Linux drivers for their platform and that's their choice, but that puts them behind even Nvidia as far as supporting Linux goes.
Since Apple do not keep their firmware ABI stable across the board, we'll have specific firmware versions (=specific macOS versions they come from) "blessed" for Linux compatibility. For updates (bugfixes or security issues, chiefly) you'd re-run our installer which will eventually have an "upgrade my firmware please" mode. That would run from recovery mode, same as the original install. All this stuff is per-OS, so it does not affect any adjacent macOS install which will use its own firmware - you can upgrade macOS whenever you want without breaking Linux.
Wifi works fine (modulo some firmware support details that'll get ironed out); people have been doing performance and stability tests and there is no major issue. I've heard stories about bad radio performance on Macs in the past, but those are almost certainly due to using the wrong firmware or config. That's what my patch set fixes: we use all the same firmwares and configs that Apple does, so we get the same results.
ATI/AMD intentionally redesigned their GPU silicon to make it's possible to develop open source drivers without exposing HDCP secrets, and even the open source drivers can use HDCP if they want to.
This is not known very widely, but this is worthy of great praise if you ask me.
Can you clarify what you mean exactly? I have a hard time believing AMD ever ran HDCP keys through the Windows kernel.
Yes, I'd not argue with that, I also never wanted or implied that I shall be able to get said keys from the card.
AMD/ATI back in the day said that, they have intentionally coupled video decoders, related logic and HDCP to same IP block for performance and silicon real-estate reasons, but in order to keep their promises about open drivers and accessible hardware, starting with (then) next generation silicon, they'll move all HDCP stuff to another IP. In turn, they will allow unfettered access to all GPU including 3D and video related features sans HDCP. However, with that architecture, even open drivers can use HDCP related hardware and functions without compromising the security and licensing around it, as a result allowing identical experience and freedom (from a developer standpoint) regardless of the driver used.
This is something to praise for, IMHO.
Ultimately the open driver should always be able to do all the same things the closed driver does and get the same result. If there are any secrets in the closed driver that "can't" be exposed, that's a security flaw in the design.
So, they were unable to provide the access they wanted to provide (for video decoders, at least), on the previous (then current) architecture.
Considering HDCP came later, it might have just been slapped as a side module and some of their math magic might be offloaded to GPU even. I remember having old ATI drivers having a very cinematic look when video was accelerated by the GPU itself (it was surreally beautiful), but they had to throw all this machinery out from the driver when they started to modernize their stack (and they broke video playback for months due to not supporting proper overlay formats).
Similarly, I think closed source drivers were programming some of the cards during initialization, because I remember they're talking about moving all this init step to the BIOS itself, and opening some doors on the BIOS to tweak the card during the init (clocks, fans, temp reads, etc. IIRC) for allowing OS and open drivers to play nicer and with less effort with the cards in the long run.
The details are hazy, because these transitions were made almost a decade ago if not longer. However, while NVIDIA was playing the deaf, and Intel was just starting to provide good open drivers for their IGPs, AMDs move as a prime GPU vendor brought a lot of good light to them.
If you want, I can try to dig the history and create a timeline for you, but it might not be an immediate endeavor.
I'm just quite confused as to how HDCP factors into all that. HDCP really is just a hardware block that's part of the video output which you enable or disable; there is a bunch of nonsense associated with PAVP and other such stuff on Windows, but none of that should really matter to Linux, nor should whatever way HDCP is implemented affect other features of the open drivers. AMD certainly do deserve credit for their work on Linux support, I just find your specific HDCP story quite strange :-)
But if I go and buy a random Windows _laptop_ and try to slap Linux on it, I might have all sorts of issues with the trackpad, webcam, fingerprint sensors, never mind sleep/wake.
That's why Linux laptop vendors are a thing and deserve our praise (just like the companies you've mentioned)! All I'm saying is that Apple is hardly the only company left that doesn't actively support Linux.
I installed Linux on a 2015 MBP recently and there is no real way to get the webcam working.
?!?!
There are vendor-provided Linux drivers for pretty much everything?
Everything in Intel and AMD CPUs are supported in mainline. nVidia provides Linux drivers.
I don't have a clear view about how many devices nowadays are reverse-engineered, and how many are provided by someone with datasheet (it happens quite often that mainline drivers are not provided by vendor directly, but by a third party that got access to datasheet), but it really feels like most vendors do work with OS vendors to get their hardware supported, and that Apple is totally an exception in the hardware world.
Also, like Java, they have maintained their own nVidia drivers up to a certain point.
Today that gap is smaller since HW manufacturers are more open about their firmwares and drivers, and Linux is more widely adopted.
I just sent in a patch series to Linux a few days ago to get all custom Broadcom cards for T2 and M1 Macs working (~2017-present), with the right firmware selection logic. Took a week or so to develop and test on both ARM64 and x86. (There was some prior art but certainly nothing that would've taken more than a few more weeks to work out from scratch; besides, I found a Broadcom source dump for Android that contained most of the interesting knowledge excluding the Apple-only bits, since some of it is relevant to newer non-Apple chips too).
Once you have a team of the right people and enough motivation, getting reverse engineered hardware working on Linux doesn't take as long as everyone thinks :-)
OTOH, kudos for all the hard work you're doing on the kernel. Maybe one day I'd have enough spare time to work on that marvelous beast.
> Once you have a team of the right people and enough motivation, getting reverse engineered hardware working on Linux doesn't take as long as everyone thinks :-)
As long as the hardware (or the vendor) is not intentionally malicious towards Linux or being reverse engineered. I've seen my fair share. :-)
The b43 days were definitely special, and that was a full from scratch reverse engineered driver plus open firmware, which is a crazy accomplishment. These days though, we just accept that we're going to have to run vendor firmware, either because there's signing involved or because it's a huge amount of work to attempt to reverse engineer and reimplement that bit. Firmwares have grown from dozens of kilobytes to megabytes and it's just not viable to rewrite all that any more, if it's even possible.
OTOH, we also have better tools for and experience reverse engineering now than we did back then. Ghidra has made "proper" disassembly and decompilation accessible to anyone, and we can run proprietary OSes in VMs to study how they interact with hardware.
> As long as the hardware (or the vendor) is not intentionally malicious towards Linux or being reverse engineered. I've seen my fair share. :-)
Well, it doesn't happen that often outside of closed platforms (i.e. needing an exploit to do anything) and Nvidia ;-)
When I was shopping around a few years ago, the fingerprint reader even on Dell's Linux-focused developer laptops was dead. I liked the Razer Blade, but many components didn't support Linux; looks like the trackpad on some models still doesn't work.
If "any vendor" actively supported Linux, we wouldn't need companies like Framework or system76 that pick compatible components. I'm not saying that Apple is particularly helpful, just that they're hardly alone in not caring about Linux.
Apple may not contribute much more than a bare platform with M1, but that isn't unusual in the scope of computer history. What's important is that they are not actively enforcing exclusivity or deterring the attempt. They've even shown tacit support in recent EFI patches by making changes that preserve the current mechanism other OSes can be loaded.
No one doubted that Intel could make a CPU as powerful. But everyone knows that it isn't gonna be cool and quiet.
Cellphones have moved away from replaceable batteries specifically because of fast charge. Most phones with 20 watt charging will reach ~50% battery in 30 mins, so even with battery degradation, you really don't notice the effect in day to day life.
Same thing with laptops, there really are very few situations where you don't have access to a charging port for ~6-8 hours.
Given that, Id personally rather take the hit on efficiency in return for way better compatibility, ability to run a full linux natively , and not deal with all the extra crap that Apple throws in the M1. And, If I really care about longevity, a second battery is easily an option for laptops like Frameworks.
I have to use it for work, and it really is a drag compared to Linux.
also, sometimes even a simple `ls` from terminal takes a few seconds. why? i have absolutely no idea.
If you don't have a stable internet connection, that could be the reason - macOS sends a hash of every executable to Apple's servers before it is opened[0]. This caused a major issue at the end of 2020, when these servers stopped working and all macs stopped working unless disconnected from the internet[1].
macOS has also been updated so that syspolicyd bypasses VPNs and system firewalls like Little Snitch[2], so you can't easily block these connections now.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/gp52pe/apple_is_tra...
I hate when people say "mine works," but here's an `ls` of my homedir showing it's not universally slow. I currently have an absolute garbage network connection.
> ls -G 0.00s user 0.00s system 64% cpu 0.010 total
There are also many, many other reasons it could be; some macOS specific and others that aren't--most importantly what they're seeing isn't universal. macOS often ships with very old GPL2 tools that can cause various problems (many people brew install updated GPL3 versions), people often have configurations that can slow down `ls` by multiple factors (colors, sorting, etc can each cause multiple queries to disk or require the listing to complete before displaying output), customizations causing a slow prompt, a slow or corrupt disk, listing a slow network drive, etc.
The VPN bypass was very quickly removed from macOS over a year ago [1]. So it would only be relevant if they were using a very old version of Big Sur.
Some specific examples,
No internet connection: instant fail over
Blocked OCSP firewall or whatever: instant fail over
Slow internet but still able to reach: slow start: 1+ seconds
Bad internet, not able to reach: 3-5 second delay waiting
Normal internet, OSCP reachable: <1 second delay
Disabled trustd: Nothing will start, single user mode and trustd restore required
I've experienced all of these and is one of the reasons I have a shiney new Framework laptop sitting waiting to be migrated over to. Also the "only on first run" also isn't true. It periodically checks for certificate revocation (as it should) and therefore will cause issues at sporadic intervals.
And the kicker of course is that all this is via plain ol' http, so everyone knows what developer's programs you're starting via the hash.
I've tried to push myself to use various Linux distros (most recently Pop and Ubuntu), but I always end up back on MacOS.
I also like the open nature of Linux. It's fun to be able to look into the source code for pretty much anything.
I do recognize that you could also just like Linux more from a usability perspective, which is your opinion to hold!
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.
It would be doubly great if the GPU were upgradable as you say.
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.
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.
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.
You can go even smaller at 3.9L in a Velka 3 [1], if you use a single fan graphics card.
I’d love to get a setup like this going with a 30x series card, but I’m not sure how difficult getting one at listing price is these days.
Buyer beware: for the Dan Case, it's only compatible with 2.25 slot (45mm) width cards at max. Most 3080s are 2.5 slot (50mm) wide. The EVGA 3080 XC3 Black is a notable exception, and is a very satisfying tight fit [0]. There's also a 3D printed GPU spacer to increase width of the case (sacrificing portability) [1].
Here's my hardware:
CASE: Dan A4-SFX v4.1 7L
PSU: Corsair SF750
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT 6C/12T 3.8GHz/4.5GHz
FANS: Asetek 645LT 92mm AIO + Noctua NF-A9x14 x2
MOTHERBOARD: Asus ROG STRIX B550-I GAMING mini-ITX
LAN: Intel I225-V 2.5Gb Ethernet
WLAN: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200
AUDIO: Realtek S1220A
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GB DDR4 @ 3600MHz
GPU: Powercolor AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Dragon
NVME0: Sabrent Rocket 1TB R/W 3400/3000
NVME1: Crucial P1 1TB R/W 2000/1700
SSD0: SanDisk Ultra II 1TB R/W 540/500
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.
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.
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]”
- 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.
> 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.
The only thing I can think of could be if the port pieces, which are essentially form-fitted dongles plugged into USB-C ports in the laptop, are causing the problem even if nothing is plugged into them?
I'll also add that I'm surprised at how long it takes to wake up from deep sleep. It's like a full 15-30 seconds of tapping ctrl to check if it's awake yet before my screen locker appears. I guess using a Mac for the last ten years spoiled me, because they usually wake up almost instantly.
I haven' yet tried to set up hibernate with a swapfile, but I wonder if that would be the thing I'm missing with regards to battery drain. It would be cool to have it suspend for an hour and then go into hibernation automatically, but I'm not sure if it would help. Might be to glitchy upon wake.
I realize it may sound like I'm complaining, so I want to clarify that I love this machine. The screen resolution is fine. It took me a little while to get it where I like it, but via .Xresources
Xft.dpi: 192
export GDK_DPI_SCALE=0.85
The build quality is good, it feels nice in my hands, and I am genuinely enjoying using it. It's been a while, and I forgot how much I loved tinkering with a Linux setup and making everything work how I want it.
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).
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.
> - 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)
But then again, I would never buy those when just released.
- 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.
> And I don't get the "better productivity" talk either.
Among other reasons some people are concerned with energy use in general.
Like for someone who works in Photoshop/Illustrator/Sketch/Figma even a little will need a great screen and almost without exception you’re not going to be getting that in a $200 laptop. This admittedly can be worked around with a “cheap” $300 IPS external monitor, but at that point you’re spending more on the monitor than your laptop which feels upside-down. (I know this from experience — at one point I had to do PS work on a $500 Gateway laptop and it was miserable because a quarter of the document’s details weren’t even visible).
Or if you’re compiling code a lot, you’re going to want more oomph than a $200 laptop can provide, because otherwise you’re going to be twiddling your thumbs and getting distracted and breaking flow waiting for code to compile. For me this is particularly impactful, and any reduction in compile times is easily felt.
As for hinges, on even a number of “mid tier” laptops, they tend to get loose and wobbly over time. I’ve seen a number of IdeaPads owned by friends and family suffer this fate.
It only costed me 375 euros. It is not a high end model, but a mid range (Lenovo E580) from a few years ago that was specced with the fastest i7 cpu and with as many ram (32GB) as supported. It is not Macbook M1 whatever fast/nice but for me it is still pretty much current. I cringe when people say they cannot work with 1080p screen but the reality is you are perefectly comfortable on them as long as you don't know better. This is something I have learned with different domains, not just computing but also sport equipment, music hardware. You don't necessarily miss the new tech until you tried it and you are not necessarily less productive, comfortable, creative or competitive on older tech, only expectations changes. But once you tested the new drug sure it is hard to come back.
Personal anecdote: at one point in the early 2010s I was cash strapped and needed a reasonably capable machine. First I tried that $500 Gateway I mentioned, which was terrible to use across almost all dimensions. I ended up returning that machine and instead putting it toward a used Dell Precision M4400 workstation laptop, which was expensive when it was new in 2008 but I got it along with a bunch of accessories off of Craigslist for $350. That thing was immensely better than the cheap 4 years newer Gateway in every way, and much much more usable for work. That machine held out for me for several years until I could afford something better.
As far as screens go, resolution is less important to me than panel quality. I’ll take a 1280x800 screen with decent color performance over a 1920x1080 screen with garbage color. In the case of the cheap Gateway, the screen’s unusability had more to do with it being a terrible bottom of the barrel TN display than it having a 1366x768 resolution. While the Precision’s panel was higher rez (1920x1200) it also handled color much much better which is what made the difference for me.
I was very surprised after I bought a nice big monitor and great mouse that I ignored them most of the time, so now I just work off the laptop, it works best for me, which I never would have guessed in my desktop years
That said, I've been very productive with a creaky noisy cheap lenovo with ubuntu so in my case it's not just about productivity but also comfort
Re: do hinges ever break? they tend to, when you use the laptop 10 hours per day
- 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.
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.
But I agree that working all day on a laptop in laptop mode is right out.
I have a laptop for those rare cases when I need to work where i am not at either of those locations.
With so capable phones in pocket, I rarely find myself needing to pull out a laptop to the point that I don't think I'd buy replacement if this one broke.
But to each his own.
For my work machine, a laptop is preferred because then I can do my work anywhere without fuss even without an internet connection.
Besides, with an M1 Pro, plugging my work laptop into the Thunderbolt hub at my desk provides a near-desktop experience for the overwhelming majority of its usage. For day to day work the difference between my M1 Pro laptop and 5950X desktop isn’t staggering enough to justify giving up portability.
Anyway a laptop becomes a desktop by plugging it's usb-c port to your docking station so there is very little downside appart from being subject to throttling when doing heavy cpu stuff to using one instead of a desktop. Which not everybody is subject too, mostly only people compiling stuff on their laptop.
I personnally spend most of my time in my office at home with dual screen but I like to move to the living room when attending conferences, in my rooftop when it is not to sunny or in the kitchen to have a chat with my gf while grabbing a tea when she is at home and I am waiting for a job/whatever to complete so a laptop is still nice to have even when working 100% from home.
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 dropped it 4 days after purchase.
My next laptop was $2000.
I dropped it a few months after purchase.
I don't live in SF. So I guess the answer to your question is yes.
My credit card has that and I've used it to replace a phone with a cracked screen. It was literally a 5 minute phone call to make the claim and all of my money was refunded the next day.
This is about snappiness only, I have no trouble finding workloads stressing this old i5 (e.g. 2k/4k videos), where an M1 would fly through. Personally, I just think snappiness alone is a bit forced argument to spent 2k$.
When this is your main tool, it’s much more pleasant to use something with a nice build quality.
I guess different people just have different needs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tho, I suspect it will perform much, much better cleaned, repaired and thermal-paste reapplied. But I wont open it, as long as I have no alternative set up.
(Also M1 + Linux, would be a no-brainer for me - best bang for the buck right now. I just fucking hate Apple OSs and the ecosystem. Oh and the keyboard too - feels as pleasant an ATM's number pad... Following Asahi closely, still.)
I try the Macbooks' keyboards every time I see one in the store. Yes, it has been even worse, but the new ones feel clickity-clackity, like an ATM pad, to me too. No travel, and annoying high pitched noises. Feels weird to rest your fingers on those keys. Not even close to a Thinkpad keyboard, old or new. I could get used to it, but it is not a great input device. Not at all. Trackpad rocks of course, but so does the nipple, if you type a lot.
Since it's a business expense, it's even cheaper.
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 :')
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.
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.
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.
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event\*"
Driver "libinput"
Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
Option "TappingButtonMap" "lrm"
Option "Tapping" "false"
This 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.
The build quality is far better than first gen devices, if not second.
Given enough time, it might be able to get many people off macOS.
The screen is amazingly crisp if you can overlook the fun resolution. Hard to look past 3x2.
Why did I return it?
I realized I needed to begin with a retail and turnkey Ubuntu experience where everything just worked and the things that mattered to me worked out of the box.
Framework is not quite an optimized retail Ubuntu experience yet like a Dell XPS with mature drivers largely ready to go.
- Battery life isn’t optimized and maximized out of the box, you will have to tpm. I have limited time for this at present. I’m sure there’s lots of interpretations that is not a a big deal. I’d rather be solving problems with the laptop than be solving problems in the laptop. I want max battery life without investing hours up front.
- Fingerprint reader required manual setup
- Wifi can have hiccups on the latest Ubuntu, and without trying into optimizing battery and kernels upset instead of getting things done.
- Touchpad is so so. Good hardware, maybe more tweaking in Linux needed. Very used to macOS too.
- HDMI port draws extra battery life when not in use so you have to to keep it removed.
The components otherwise seem high quality and well put together.
Again it’s not that these issues can’t be overcome, or that they won’t be out of the box in the future, I simply don’t have the time for either at present.
It was a joy to use for browsing in Ubuntu 21.04 as stuff is broken in 21.10.
- My touchpad is really flaky. Sometimes it works perfectly, but most of the time simply clicking just... doesn't work. Moving the cursor, tap to click, scrolling work fine, but the actual pressing the touchpad to an audible click won't result in a click on the machine. This seems to be a hardware issue, it can sometimes be remedied by pressing down across the whole touchpad, but not always, and it seems to be worse when it's cold in the room. Also, once in a blue moon it won't initialize quite right when waking from sleep causing it to be hypersensitive; putting the device back to sleep and rewaking it fixes that.
- They mentioned they were fond of the battery life, which surprises me as that seems to be the devices biggest failing. I'm somewhat new to Linux laptops, but even after setting up hibernate and deep sleep and all that, I simply can't leave it on sleep over night or it will drain the entire battery. The battery life while using it is fine, not as good as my old MacBook, but I've had to start shutting it down when not in use.
- The speakers really aren't great. A big part of that is the fact that they're downward facing, which seems a really bizarre design decision to me.
- Fractional scaling. This is more of an issue with Linux itself. I actually really like the display as a whole, particularly the 3:2 ratio. However, 1x is too small, and I found 2x to be too large. I've been using 150% scaling, which worked well for the most part, except some applications wouldn't obey it (cough Steam). I then tried switching to Wayland, which seems to have fixed Steam's issues (and the trackpad scrolling notably improved oddly), but xwayland programs have really blurry text.. There's always a bit of a tradeoff, although I'm still experimenting with this. I also find this display gives me more eye strain at later hours than other screens I use. YMMV.
Overall, I would say I am satisfied with my purchase however. I love the keyboard, love the modularity, I like the customizability. I don't regret the purchase, but I do think there are some things potential buyers should be aware of.
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.
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!
> Can this be made upgradable in the future? Would seriouly consider building one for gaming if they were.
IMO gaming with the current Framework design is a lost cause as cooling would become a major issue that I imagine will require designing around.
If I recall correctly, framework's USB ports are Thunderbolt-compatible, has anyone tried using an eGPU enclosure with them?
1. Ubuntu 21.10 had horrid support of the hardware. Eventually switching to Fedora 35 fixed most bugs
2. The DisplayPort expansion card I received was faulty and sometimes caused horrible performance.
3. EMI shields were incorrectly placed on my expansion slots[^1]. Eventually I simply removed them to get full performance back.
In the end, after months of tweaking and talking to support, I got a new DisplayPort card, switched to Fedora 35 and everything works smoothly.
[1]: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/one-port-on-my-laptop...
I'm sad about the speakers if they are as flat as they said, even more if they are not upgradable parts. MacBook speakers are really good for their purpose and I even consider them to be one of the importants things I trully love on macbooks (with the screen and the touchpad).
Anyway, I'm still looking to buy a Framework laptop soon but I'd love to be able to test one before buying it.
While you can certainly manually add DSP to your system (PulseEffects, some random JACK or PipeWire flow, etc. - I do exactly this for headphone calibration on my desktop), what we need is a standardized mechanism for storing speaker profiles and having the audio subsystem seamlessly and transparently apply the right EQ and crossover profile for your device (there are usually more than 2 speakers). This is already a thing on e.g. Android, but not desktop Linux.
This is required for MacBooks too. For Asahi Linux, once the underlying sound hardware works, we'll be spending some time working out a sane way to do this; I consider it a mandatory feature in this day and age. And once that's all done, everyone will be able to use it to get proper sound on any laptop as long as they can obtain or make an EQ profile.
For the Macs, our plan is to measure impulse responses of what macOS does (we have the ability to snoop on its hardware accesses, so we can just play a test sound and capture the raw samples going to the speakers) and use them on Linux. This should give identical audio at moderate volumes. I'll have to check whether it also does some kind of compression or volume-dependent EQ worth replicating or emulating too, at higher volumes.
They do some sort of crosstalk cancellation to make stereo sound better, it'd be interesting to look at those impulse responses and see that happening!
When travelling I will always use headset, when hooked to docking it uses my home studio monitor speakers and if I want to listen to watch a movie in the bed or a show in my kitchen it is paired to my Bose bluetooth speaker.
This is absolutely something we want to improve in the future. We're actively investigating other audio parts we can use that have better capability, but equally importantly, supply availability and software support.
It’s wonderful when companies listen to (potential) customers.
You are doing an amazing (and important) work.
I wish you all the best and you are on my top list for my next laptop (although, my current one is far from dead).
It would be nice if the expansion cards came with a plastic cap to protect the usb c plug, I wouldn’t want to toss the spare hdmi card in my bag as is, but in the spirit of open hardware maybe one will pop up on thigaverse.
For the Expansion Cards, there are some discussions on holders for them as well as 3D printed designs from the community: https://community.frame.work/t/expansion-card-carrying-case/...
Have your pick of these [1]. There are expansion card holders/cases, which might also be an option.
I'm evaluating reports of Framework+Linux-distros' sleep/wake/hibernate impacts upon video resolution switching, WiFi stability, and trackpad stability, to determine when to pull the trigger on purchasing a fully tricked-out model. I can afford to run an Apple M-class laptop (holding out for next batch) and a Framework at the same time, and make the effort to transition off the macOS ecosystem (any consumer-grade and office apps I want not available on Linux, I'm happy to run under Windows within Linux).
The straw that broke my camel's back was the latest macOS update that deleted all Safari tabs. Around the same time, iOS update did something similar: deleted all back history on all Safari tabs. After the many other problems I put up with in macOS, I figured if I'm going to be spelunking around the system to fix Apple software problems as frequently as I have found myself doing in the past decade, I might as well work with others on the source, as Linux is getting awfully close to "good enough" quality these days for my daily driver, at least enough for me to give it a fair shot with sustained effort on peer hardware as my Apple gear.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Athingiverse.com+usb+c...
- I need a mate screen option, glossy displays in ambient light give me headaches.
- Some folks will also probably want touchscreens (uber glossy), more power to them
- Would also be very cool to bring back the old tech of transflective displays like the one in the Pixel Qi display. For folks that want to work outside (me again!) and are not fussed about color accuracy.
I have a ThinkPad T480 with:
- i7-8650U CPU
- Intel UHD Graphics 620 integrated and NVIDIA MX150 discrete graphics
- WQHD display (2560x1440)
- IR and HD cameras
- Speakers are kinda crappy
- True 10 hour runtime (limited by extra batteries)
- Hot-swappable 72 Whr second battery
- 64 GiB RAM # (it's not supposed to work according to Lenovo's and Intel's datasheet but it does)
- 2 TiB M.2 SSD #
- WiFi 6E + Bluetooth 5.2 #
- 4G WWAN card
- TPM 2.0
- Fingerprint reader
- NFC
- Milspec drop rating
- Awesome IBM-heritage, water-resistant, backlit keyboard
- Multitouch glass touchpad &
- TrackPoint pointing stick (red thing in the middle of the keyboard)
- Magnesium top display cover &
- USB-C charging
- Smartcard reader
- Ports including USB-A and -C, SD, HDMI, Ethernet, and audio jack
- Security lock slot
- Thunderbolt 3
- Docking station (latest Ultra) that works
# Customization
& Parts swap
It's massively upgradable. 8 captive screws, and the bottom case pops out, the keyboard pops out too. ~10 screws, and the motherboard and everything else is out. People make frakenpads because the parts stayed so similar over the years. All the screws are Phillips. No hunting for weird Torx bits.
When the next iteration of motherboards come out, I won't be buying a new laptop, ideally I will go here https://frame.work/marketplace and just order the one that I want and follow the video guides to install it.
The potential to customize this is huge, larger than any other laptop that I'm familiar with. The ability to self maintain, to fix every piece of the hardware if necessary just makes this thing a win for me.
I typically buy replace my laptops or desktops after around 6 years. That is a long time to expect things to remain compatible with a chassis.
- They seem to be getting worse for repairability and build quality with each new generation. Everyone who raves seems to be running older generations (yours is comparatively not too old).
- Trying to buy new is an exercise in frustration because of their ridiculous pricing. Either get gouged outside a sale paying a huge premium over competitors, or wait for the right sale and get a competitive (but not cheap) price.
And while the are up and downs with the quality there seen to be a general downward trend.
Like my previous Thinkpad didn't had any major defects after the years but with my current one after not quite the years the mousepad broke (the coating is damaged getting slowly worse starting as just an annoyance to now frequently registering phantom middle clicks).
Similar while using custom secure boot platform keys have been working with Thinkpad T series for years, for the lastish T14 series a non distinguishable subset of them gets bricked by it.
- Trackpad is decent. However, as some others have mentioned, it can be a bit touchy. It's happened a few times that I'm typing and I accidentally rest part of my right thumb on the trackpad and that changes the insertion point inadvertently. Not a big issue. As a matter of fact, it's more an indication that I need to correct my hands posture for better ergonomics.
- Bluetooth. It's pretty stable. I have a Bluetooth mouse and Galaxy Buds connected and they work flawlessly. I'll try more devices.
(edit: added Galaxy Buds over Bluetooth)
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Framework_Laptop
One thing to note, is that I had a bad time with tlp. I would suggest using auto-cpufreq if you want better battery life.
But all other keys... does nobody ever uses Home/End/PgUp/PgDown/Insert/ContextMenu keys these days?
<rant>
Ask HN: Nobody ever uses Home/End/PgUp/PgDown/Insert/ContextMenu keys these days?
I understand what the current laptop keyboard layouts are made by alien^W someone who is clearly not using the computer as a work tool, but we are close to a decade of this ...nonsense.
All Fn+ keys REQUIRE using both hands. It is all fine until you are somewhere where you need to use one hand to hold your notebook and ... you can no longer press any Fn+ combo.
I have a pretty big hands and I can't stretch my fingers enough to reach both bottom-left Fn and any key on the right side of keyboard. On a 14" laptop. Which could had all the keys (compare X220 and T440 for example) but it doesn't.
Thinkpads are still have PrtScr on ContextMenu, which means I would 100% lose contents of the clipboard some hours later. Who needs PrtScr /there/ anyway? I want to hear the reasoning, like "we noticed (through our telemetry? how?) what our users are making screenshots all the day so we moved the PrtScr in the place of ContextMenu button"? You can replace the Space with PrtScr then, it would be pressed even more.
16" notebook? You will still have a sub 12" keyboard on it [0]
14" notebook? You won't even have the chance to see it's keyboard - you can see photo of it's back (like this is somehow important in the age where is nothing on a laptop back) but you can't see it's keyboard.
</rant>
[0] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/x...
[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/x...
> They have other shortcuts
Thanks, I prefer two dedicated hardware keys to delete text, instead of one and Fn+Delete.
I do informal surveys of new laptops -- I wander around computer shops bashing out a sentence or two into Notepad or TextEdit.
They're all awful now. But most people are used to awful and so don't care.
Layouts suck too but that, to me, is secondary to key feel. If the layout is bad, some keystrokes will be bad; but if the key feel is bad, every keystroke will be bad.
I do this as well but I type in hello world in C. It helps me get a feel for what the keyboard is going to be like while programming.
Most are atrocious, but not as bad as rubber-dome desktop KBs.
Want fingerprint support (which is supposedly first-class)? Spend an hour fiddling with drivers and configuration files until it works.
Want to download discord? Spend an hour trying out the different methods of installing it until you find the one that works acceptably for your installation.
and so on. It was not uncommon to wake it up from sleep only to have it kernel. That's not acceptable when I'm trying to take a timed quiz in class.
And yet I still think it's a great machine. It's just not for me- someone who's purchasing as an enthusiast or looking for a "project laptop" would probably love it. I need a laptop with high availability though, and I just don't think desktop Linux is ready for that.
No, it's not. I do cross-platform development for over a decade now and all I have are virtual machines. Over 2 dozens of them and I never owned any Apple hardware. Why pay for overpriced hardware when virtualization covers everything for a 100th of the price?
"You agree not to install, use or run the Apple SDKs on any non-Apple-branded computer, and not to install, use or run iOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, macOS and Provisioning Profiles on or in connection with devices other than Apple-branded products, or to enable others to do so."
[0] https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/terms/apple-de...
IANAL, but it doesn't work like that. Like any original creative work, macOS falls under copyright protection. Apple only gives you a licenses you to copy/run macOS on Apple-branded hardware.
You might want to take a second look at their EULA for their Apple developer ID
I don't see anything in the Apple Developer Agreement that would cancel the terms of the macOS EULA. But I'd love to be proven wrong, please give me a pointer.
you'll see that for those $100/year they sing a very different song. Money talks!
$100/year is less than pocket change for Apple. Even if they have a million paying developers (unlikely), it's ~1/3658th of their yearly revenue. If they'd make their iPhones 50 cents more expensive, they would make more money.
The $100 per year is only there as one of the many ways to fight scammers. It makes it more costly to open many accounts, they have a credit card (with a name) on file, etc. Sure, it is not air tight, but it is just one of many measures.
I would never do iOS development seriously without native devices.
Virtualization brings you far, true, but it's still different.
I would even create a hardware lap if I would do end-user device Software development.
And the quote is still true. If you do iOS MacOS development it IS the obvious choice obviously.
Yours might be cheaper and might have other advantages but it is NOT obvious.
…except for display quality, performance and battery life.
Half the fun, at least for me was always liberating an old Windows PC.
The pricing on this isn't really competitive with buying a mid Windows Laptop + seeing if Ubuntu runs. Such fun to give up on Ubuntu and use Fedora since Fedora was supported better.
You can swap battery, harddrive, memory, network chip yay. That was possible on nearly all laptops some years back. At the enterprise level both Dell and Lenovo have models that does most of this. (Unless recently discontinued)
Quite a few laptops had "bays" where you could swap out extra harddrive, cd rom, extra battery,
Then a while back computer had PCMCIA/PC Card, that let you add all sorts of very useful hardware.
All in all this is far less user configurable than a two bay, to pcmia slots. (with battery, memory easily upgraded).
I would love someone to come out with a laptop like that again.
Further modules for the framework are expensive, made by a single company, few variants. If the company fails you are stuck.
On the old style laptops, ram, memory, cd player, extra hard drive, batteries, PCMCIA/PC Cards were all usually available from several sources. Bays might be the most proprietary.
Not necessarily in this size class/with this chassis design. "Ultrabooks" as a class haven't been nearly as user-serviceable as you're suggesting.
> made by a single company, few variants; Bays might be the most proprietary
Eh. I'm not terribly worried about this given that they're TB3 or TB4 (to wit: PCIe) and provided with reference designs[1].
I have to admit, though, that I couldn't easily find IBM's old expansion bay spec or proprietary connector... or for that matter, HP's, or Dell's, or... well, yes. Bays sure are proprietary. To extoll the virtues of somebody else's bays and in the same breath deny these is at best misplaced nostalgia. :)
So it's not just me :)
I bought a Ryzen APU since everybody kept telling me that AMD GPUs where the best when it came to Linux support, and it has been a massive pain. It finally runs almost stable using the latest Pop_OS, but it has been a not fun journey to get here.
No. Only in backwards anachronistic PC land is 2256x1504 "high resolution" in 2022.
The 14" Macbook Pro is 3024x1964. My XPS actually has 3840x2160.
Please kill this meme. 1500 pixels tall is not a high res screen.
[1] https://frame.work/blog/now-available-for-pre-order-in-uk-ge...
*=Apple and Framework. I'm calling Framework "major" because they have the ear of the industry. They're a computer-person's computer company.
* Power and cable clarity. For most folks there is no real way to pick up a random power supply, and a random cable, and have any idea how fast your device will actually charge. Or if it will at all. Generally plugging a laptop into a charger that doesn’t supply sufficient power ends up in battery drain while plugged in.
* A realistic hub. Every try to find a USBC hub? The best I’ve found without paying multiple hundreds of dollars includes a usbc port for power, and a usbc port for a device. I’ve yet to find a reasonable device that allows me to plug 4 usbc devices into one usbc port.
As for mini usb, the only thing I own that uses it is my TI-84+ calculator.
I'm not sure if the Apple M1 is going to be beaten (especially in the efficiency department), but challenged for sure. Will have to wait and see.
I’d usually be wary of dropping that much cash on a product from a vendor without a track record.
How well backed / funded are these guys?
I paid £500 for a laptop 10 years ago (so, more with inflation) and it was:
1) Built really shit, fell apart after a year, broken hinges, weird fan noise
2) Got super hot.
3) had about 3hrs on battery if you avoided doing anything on it.
4) was huge and heavy.
Not saying you’re wrong. But maybe your expectations vastly differ from mine.
All in all if you take care of them it can be used as work horse during vacations. Only thing I can't do on them is last generation gaming, for that I need my usual work horse which is a $2500 desktop gaming rig.
Macbooks seemingly hold their value though, and it's a wonder of why this is.
This laptop is the reason I don’t buy bottom of the barrel prices with high specifications.
[0]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-5520G.6408.0.html
I'd like to know what somebody thinks of this laptop after having used it for a few months, at least.
To be fair I haven't purchased a laptop since 2010.
These days you can't even change the battery on most laptops.
Given the number of people who argue about which ports are the right ones I think it's quite a nice feature.