Hacker News Reader

Comment by rnk | Hacker News Reader

Seems too good to be true. Reasonable prices, upgradable, no soldered ram. So has it been a reliable Linux laptop, what's the battery life with your options?

View on HN

You nailed it, battery is the only downside I’ve had, not awful but probably say 3 hours of video playback, or 5-6 hours of web use. Haven’t used it unplugged all that much so very rough guesses. Bigger problem with my fedora install at least is battery draining while the lid is closed.

Overall great machine

Edit: I may be missing software updates that improve this, no idea

I very much wanted to hear about this and damn :-( Video playback must be hardware accelerated by now and be super efficient. Another worry was about low power sleep modes and waking up, and looks like it is not solved too. I might have to suck it up and buy the Mac for my needs after all. I have my trusty Linux desktop for all my big compute needs. I was hoping to make the mobile machine also run Linux, but the specific needs there (crisp display, nice battery life, Linux friendliness) seems to be an elusive goal.

* crisp display

* nice battery life

* Linux friendliness

Not elusive at all, you can find an M1 MacBook Pro at any Apple, Best Buy, or Costco store.

M1 are not Linux-friendly at all.

Run it in a VM. Works fine.

This is like responding "well you can make the civic look like a sports car, that should cover you!" when someone says "I want to drive fast".

There's some concerns about paravirtualized GPU performance, but the equivalent of "sports car" (workstation/server-like workloads) runs in VMs in cloud providers all the time.

I can run a Linux vm emulating x64 or aarch64 right now on M1…

Not to mention zsh is the login shell out of the box…

It’s more flexible that WSL2 in my opinion

See https://github.com/lima-vm/lima for a very friendly QEMU wrapper running on M1

You can't even run unsigned apps on your M1. There is linux support slowly coming thanks to the fine folks on Asahi, but it is very pre-beta.

I can run a Linux vm emulating x64 or aarch64 right now on M1…

It’s more flexible that WSL2 in my opinion

See https://github.com/lima-vm/lima for a very friendly QEMU wrapper

I can write a program and send it to my friend - and they can actually run it - without me paying $99/year to Apple.

Try that on your M1.

You can run unsigned software on an M1 Mac, clicking “run anyway” isn’t that hard lol

That is untrue for native arm apps. The OS actually requires signing. If you are running an x86 app through Rosetta you can currently avoid code signing requirement.

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/08/22/apple-silicon-macs-will-...

What’s the big deal? They don’t require it to be notarized. You can self-sign.

Quite frankly no one should be running unsigned binaries regardless of OS or architecture.

The M1 MacBook Air honestly feels so far ahead of any other laptop I've used that it's not even funny. Fanless, powerful, absolutely bonkers battery life.

M1 + Nix is ideal, IMO.

You have Nix running on M1?

Nix is the package manager, NixOS is the OS.

https://nix.dev/tutorials/install-nix#macos

It's still a real pain to get hardware accelerated video in a browser on Linux. Google is still outright refusing to support it in chromium, even though they do support it inside Chrome OS. There are few community patches floating around if you're willing to roll your own chromium to enable to Chrome OS hardware decode pathways on generic Linux.

You can mostly get it working on Firefox if you play around with the config options, but it only works with AMD and Intel GPUs (anything supporting vaapi).

Really? I’m pretty sure chromium has decent VAAPI support.

Oh! Looks like they finally started adding official support last summer (June 2021). It still appears disabled by default though.

As a heads up they fixed the intel xe graphics sandboxing issue in firefox 96. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698778 It works great on my Framework with NixOS. My about:config settings (taken from my home-manager):

graphics = { "media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled" = true; "media.rdd-ffmpeg.enabled" = true; "media.navigator.medidataencoder_vpx_enabled" = true; };

I’m very happy with purism’s librem 14 but the display is not as nice as frameworks.

I've been using a Framework laptop for a month on Ubuntu 21.10 and pretty happy with it. Some hiccups but mostly answered by digging through forums.

Battery life in operation is excellent, but it does drain 30% in 8 hours when on suspend which is a bit much. Not a dealbreaker but hope this can be solved.

Out of my element here, but would be curious to see if this is something solvable in firmware (now open-sourced!) or if it's a hardware problem to begin with (power states? etc).

Edit: Also curious if this issue is generally a hardware or firmware issue in most laptops, or if it's a mix of both.

Could be caused by Modern Standby (by default newer laptops remain on even when nominally off, which has been known to cause issues). Some more details here:

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/145891-how-check-if-mode...

I can imagine that the power draw in S3 could come from having (replacable) DDR Memory instead of (mostly soldered) LP-DDR Memory.

edit: typo.

The problem is that current Intel laptops don't use S3 anymore, they use S0ix a.k.a. "modern standby", an abomination where the CPU doesn't really sleep and the battery drains fast.

Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. all have the same problem.

I have a Thinkpad X1 from 2018 and by default it came with S0ix enabled and Lenovo later on added the S3 sleep state option through a BIOS update, called "Linux compatibility something".. Before that, one had to manually edit the DSD table to get rid of this evil burning-sleeping-laptop-in-backpack-feature called S0ix.

Does the Framework Laptop, or other popular models from the other manfacturers you mentioned, not have a S3 sleep state option these days, i.e. S0ix only?

So it was believed that S3 is deprecated on TGL, but it probably works. I remember reading about it on some coreboot channels. Starlabs may have enabled it. Grep for S3 on https://support.starlabs.systems/kb/bios-and-firmware/bios-a...

S0ix has stronger requirements on the "correct" interaction between firmware/BIOS and OS, it offloads more work to the OS. Poorly implemented S0ix will drain the battery faster, but correctly implemented S0ix is as good as S3 or even better.

Lenovo put out a buggy S3 implementation on some systems that hasn't been tested well because it's only an optional "Linux suspend" setting. Drains twice as fast as Linux with correctly implemented S0ix. And the worst thing is, nobody except Lenovo do can fix it because it's all on the BIOS level, and their China-based firmware team has other priorities.

Well-implemented S3 is nice. But it's going to disappear. Both Intel and AMD are switching away with full force, vendors won't have S3 options in the BIOS going forward and the ones that remain will likely suck. On the other hand, S0ix support is coming together even on AMD platforms which were a little late to the party. Once it's working decently, I'd rather trust my OS than my laptop manufacturer's firmware team to suspend components correctly.

High battery drain during standby on Linux can be due to the system not entering the proper sleep state. I had this happen to me on an AMD machine lately, in that case disabling secure boot solved the issue.

Here is a pretty detailed blog post in checking if that is the problem and how to deal with it on intel systems

https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-li...

> disabling secure boot solved the issue

Lovely...

Isn't secure boot just a Microsoft thing to try to stymie competition by preventing booting OSes other than Windows?

Debian seems to indicate otherwise: https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot

> cat /sys/power/mem_sleep

If deep isn't selected do so and try again. You could have problems with your nvme coming out of suspend though.

I got similar problems on my pinebook pro, but sadly this is all too common.

Battery life on mine with a pretty minimal Arch install and TTY is around 10 hours when doing light web browsing and programming. Only problems I’ve had are hardware related. The trackpad isn’t 100% reliable (sometimes clicks don’t work and I have to press hard to get it to work again) and the hinge is far too loose. Love the laptop overall.

From what I've heard battery life is much worse on Linux than Windows. If you're willing to spend some time hacking around you can close the gap a bit, but it'll still be a gap.

Personally I can't confirm this. I've recently replaced the battery on my 2014 Thinkpad, and on low brightness I get around 8h of battery. That is of course, while not doing a lot of compute (compiling).

I don't think this was much higher, back when I used Windows all those years ago, so I'm not sure what people are saying with low battery with Linux? I don't see how Windows could get me much more? And why would it?

If you have a Thinkpad, then the issues with the Framework (CPU sleep states, needing to turn of secure boot to hibernate properly, power management issues in Framework BIOS 3.06, etc) wouldn't necessarily apply to your laptop

I’ve found this to be variable in my personal experience based on OS, hardware, and use of TLP.

I haven't run Windows in my Framework laptop so I can't really say if there's a difference but the issue in Linux was mostly because deep sleep wasn't enabled for some distros.

Having come from elementaryOS I can say that Fedora 35 is awesome. So much better!

Having come from Debian, Ubuntu, and Manjaro I settled on what feels like the last distro I will use on my own systems: NixOS. It's not so much better, it's so much different.

Every(ish) single package, every single line of configuration(ish) is under version control in a(couple) nix files. I share (most) of it between my systems. With flakes (and it's lockfile) it's a 100%(ish) deterministic system.

Downside: The language is arcane to me and the tooling is dogshit. Not that I could've made it any better, but running my config repo through entre to rebuild on every write to get some promiscuous error nobody has had before sucks major D.

Therefore I still have an Ubuntu container (because every desktop application targets Ubuntu) running with X11 forwarding for the few packages that aren't in nixpkgs that I wanna run.

I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my dotfiles. Since I want my home configuration to work on MacOS and other distros I might SSH.

Atomic upgrades and downgrades are such a great feature I don't know how people can live without it now that I've experienced it.

Note: The default configuration NixOS gives you is also shit, out of the box they don't ship a system like you'd want to consume it (nixos-generate-config). An anecdotal example is that Avahi isn't installed by default, which means chromecasting won't work until you figure out that you need Avahi, i18n config is shit too.

So it's not all green grass, but definitely worth it, since every Nix line you write is an investment into making your experience better "forever" (I don't see NixOS going away anytime soon, very healthy activity on the project).

Now after praising NixOS for awhile, let's praise the developers of all packages that are compiled into the lovely distros you all use. For me the KDE team can't get enough praise, the software is so damn good.

> I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my dotfiles. Since I want my home configuration to work on MacOS and other distros I might SSH.

FYI, home manager works on MacOS just fine. I usually tell people to start with Home Manager as I think it's the best gateway drug to Nix stuff at the moment.

Yes indeed, I should've expanded to requiring user namespaces and other kernel magic I can't expect from any random box i wanna work on.

I'm looking forward to checking Darwin nix stuff out.

> Yes indeed, I should've expanded to requiring user namespaces and other kernel magic I can't expect from any random box i wanna work on.

That's fair, do have to make sure to avoid to modules that do user systemd services.

Longer term, though, I am hoping https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare will help with the userland part. And I hope to personally help with things like

https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-arch/2022-January...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f8457e20-c3cc-6e56-96a4-3090d7d...

to get us more sane cross-platform system calls.

Just wanted to echo all of this. I started with home-manager and then moved to NixOS over the holiday. It’s really been great: easy to set up, relatively easy to configure most things, and it’s so lovely to know that the changes I make are checked into version control for easy use across machines.

Same here. Over the holidays I first tried NixOS in a VM and really liked it. I had a lot of fun setting up the system. A week later I installed it as my main OS and is has been great so far

The screen is very low-res and the GPU is weak. This is why I don't have one.

If you don't care about pixels (seems common in PC-land), this is probably a good thing re: power consumption.

I look at text all day, every day, and want it to be high res. It's been high res on my Macs for half a decade, and my XPS is even better. I'll get one of these once they fix the screen.

The Framework has a 200 DPI screen. It's lower than say a MacBook, but I wouldn't consider that to be "low-res", especially in the laptop space.

This 'low-res' comment makes no sense, I'll never go back to 1080p, but 2256x1504 is plenty IMO for text (I live in a CLI all day pretty much).

Especially on a 13" screen. I have an XPS 13 with a 4k screen and I never use it at native resolution undocked because I'd need a magnifying glass to read anything on it.

You're always using it at native resolution, you're just adjusting your renderer settings.

Nobody's saying your fonts should be tiny. I'm saying they should be rendered in high resolution.

I have the same computer and display. I run it at 4k native but nothing is small, no magnifying glass required.

> You're always using it at native resolution, you're just adjusting your renderer settings.

No, when I wrote 'native resolution' I meant 1:1 pixel mapping, which is pretty obvious by context. Nobody has a laptop with a CRT on it these days.

That's been the unfortunate part: "do you want 4K or 1080?" has been the question for the longest part without consideration that many people want something in between--hiDPI without going into sizing where you can't tell the different. I have only had 4K screens (15", 14", & 13") since 2015 and can't handle 1080, but I don't want the wasted battery from 4K on smaller sizes.

Once you get used to 220+ ppi, it's very difficult to go back.

I even don't like my 218ppi displays that much, they are a little fuzzy compared to my 300+ ppi displays.

It's not a matter of opinion what is "low" or "high" when dealing with integers for resolution. It's evident that you think a low-res (by 2022 market options) display is sufficient. That's fine, but it doesn't make it high res.

There are people who think an analog serial console with 24 lines and 80 columns is sufficient resolution for text. That's not what's being discussed: simply the resolution of the display in the computer. It's low by modern laptop standards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com