Comment by toberoni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toberoni | Hacker News Reader

I'm using a Framework with Kubuntu and I have mixed feelings about it. I like the 3:2 screen ratio, repairability & the expansion cards. However, there are many downsides:

- The battery life is ATROCIOUS, even after TLP etc. It's about the same as my 4-year-old(!) Thinkpad. Standby battery drain is the worst, easily 20-30% overnight, which I find unacceptable. I can't use this laptop as intended and always have to switch it off completely. Also because of this:

- BIOS 3.06 ships with a bug that could result in the Framework not switching on if the battery is drained to 0%. The new beta BIOS might fix that, but errors like this show this is not a mature product.

- There are no stable LVFS firmware upgrades for Linux yet and some users also report overwritten bootloaders after upgrading. Linux compatibility is definitely not there yet.

- Many small annoyances on Linux: Fingerprint reader is not working out of the box, screen tearing, Bluetooth regressions etc. on certain kernels.

- My Framework didn't turn on for almost 2 weeks. I tried different RAM/SSDs to no avail... then, it suddenly worked again with the original components. No problems after that, very strange.

- The speakers are worse than the one in my smartphone. On most surfaces it sounds muffled and just not right.

- My CPU fan made strange noises. I could fix that thanks to the great repairability though.

- The fan can get very loud. Fortunately, it happens very rarely. Most of the time it's silent when browsing the internet or doing web dev work.

- Build quality is clearly a step down from my old Thinkpad X1 Yoga. The hinge doesn't feel as strong, some keys are mushy/creaking and I'm skeptical my Framework will survive as many falls as my old laptop.

Don't get me wrong: it's impressive for a first iteration product and a lot of modern laptops can't compete with it (despite the Framework being far more extensible). It ticks many boxes and offers a package that is hard to find these days (Lenovo & Co. seem to love soldered-on RAM, decreased keyboard travel, fewer ports).

After many glowing reviews I just expected a bit more. Coming from a 4-yo premium Thinkpad I'm not sure the Framework is an upgrade. It's more fragile, (currently) has worse Linux support & no next-day business support. I would definitely wait for the next generation of laptops.

Standby battery drain in deep sleep in Linux is something we're investigating. We have seen enough reports of it to know there is an issue there, but one that does not occur in Windows.

We do strongly recommend updating to 3.07. The issue in 3.06 was a regression that we've released 3.07 to resolve. We'll be removing the Beta label on the release shortly since we've seen large update on the release.

I agree we have work to do collaborating with Linux distro maintainers to ensure compatibility out of the box. We've been able to do that with the team at Fedora and Fedora 35 has basically complete support and solid stability: https://community.frame.work/t/fedora-linux-35-on-the-framew...

Beyond that, we very much appreciate the feedback. We're always looking to improve what we're building, and real user feedback helps us do that.

Too late to edit, but that should be "we've seen large uptake on the release".

Maybe need mem_sleep_default=deep in the boot parameters in the grub config - this was needed on my XPS to stop battery drain during suspend.

Enabling deep sleep and hibernate solve the issue in this configuration. Once enabled, using systemctl hibernate or suspend-then-hibernate work like a charm. I wrote details here https://luisartola.com/solving-the-framework-laptop-battery-...

I have to disagree on the build quality, I found it really only second to MacBooks and Dell XPS. Ultimately I returned it for an M1 MacBook because of the battery. With an M1 I charge it once a week and it sips power on standby. The Framework was dropping 30-40% battery overnight on sleep.

That is most likey a Linux problem in general. Linux is known to have worse energy management. TFA explains the owner had to enable deep sleep and hibernation:

> One of the initial caveats with installing Ubuntu is that deep sleep and hibernate are not enabled by default. Deep sleep is easy to enable. Hibernate takes a bit more effort, but it’s straightforward. Once configured it works like a charm. I noticed about a 2% drain in 3 days of hibernation. If this power loss is linear, it can go for weeks in hibernation.

My battery results were with deep sleep. I was unable to get hibernation working although I didn’t put a lot of time into trying it.

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

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

No, it isn't even. Mine drains that fast with the s3 "deep" sleep enabled.

It's horrible.

I don't have a Framework, but I had this kind of problem with my Dell XP. Turns out there is a USB port that will drain the battery if anything is plugged in there - and this is even documented but not very visible in the docs. I had to move my device to a different port to alleviate this. Maybe something similar is going on here?

I don't have mine plugged into anything while it's sleeping.

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'm glad to find that it's not just me. I was wondering what I've done wrong to wake up with 80% battery after closing the lid and unplugging it. After two swollen batteries in a MacBook Pro, I've made a habit of not leaving a laptop on the charger 24/7, but it sucks to throw this thing in a backpack and head to a coffee shop only to discover that I don't have a full charge.

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

and

    export GDK_DPI_SCALE=0.85

Everything looks nice in i3.

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.

Unfortunately this is happening with S3 sleep and numerous battery tuning tricks activated.

Don't buy the Framework as your main laptop if you plan to travel/use it unplugged a lot - I consider it a broken device for this intended usage. Put down the lid overnight and you'll have around 2-4h SOT left (and that's with a fully charged brand-new battery).

No other business laptop in the last 15 years felt so limiting in this regard, battery life is a constant worry. My Framework won't leave the dock and I'll hope manufacturers close the gap to the M1 soon (I don't care about raw power, but energy efficiency).

I'm running Xubuntu 21.10 on my Framework and am relatively happy. Mine stays docked most of the time without much travel so haven't noticed the battery issues.

> - There are no stable LVFS firmware upgrades for Linux yet and some users also report overwritten bootloaders after upgrading. Linux compatibility is definitely not there yet.

At the moment, you can't upgrade BIOS on Linux systems without using Windows which is a major shortcoming. No LVFS support is a big miss right now for Linux users

I've measured a drain of ~0.9% per hour on mine when the lid is closed (deep sleep, not hibernating) and I've only USB-C expansion cards slotted in (or no cards at all). When I've two USB-C cards and and 2 USB-A cards it goes up to ~2%/hr. So your large drain might (~3%/hr) might be mostly from whichever cards you've got in.

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