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Comment by geoffeg | Hacker News Reader

I've come very close to buying a Framework laptop a few times, but I'd only want to run Linux on it and wasn't sure how well it was supported. How are things like wifi, sleep and battery life under Linux?

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Fedora 35 is essentially fully supported and I believe their recommended distro[1]. I installed this to test it out and OOTB is was perfect, I may switch to this full time as it has the best vanilla gnome experience too (IMO). The other one they indicate that has near full support after install is Ubuntu 21.04.

FWIW I've been using elementaryOS 6.1 for most of the time and it's been really nice too. Full disclosure though it was pretty DIY; wifi did not work right away (I had to upgrade the kernal), I had to install some software to enable the fingerprint reader, and I needed to manually enable fractional scaling.

I definitely recommend it to run Linux, the community is fantastic and another strong selling point.

[1] https://frame.work/blog/linux-on-the-framework-laptop

I'm running Xubuntu on mine and it works fine. Battery life goes down pretty quick when sleeping, and battery life is definitely lower than Windows, but I can still get 4-5 hours of actual work on it.

>Battery life goes down pretty quick when sleeping

Thank you for confirming.

I guess I will have to wait until an improved version of Framework that supports proper sleep.

After changing a couple of Group Policy sleep settings in Windows 10, and removing some expansion modules, my framework Laptop uses around 300 mW while asleep. That means it takes the whole night before it drains 5% off the battery (and switches to hibernate). I haven’t yet replicated this in Linux, but I assume it’s possible (someone can correct me if I’m wrong). Im not sure yet whether it was the settings changes, or certain expansion modules which affect standby drain the most, but I’ve seen forum discussions where people were making progress narrowing it down, and I think the framework peeps were going to look into it. I will do more experimenting today. Unrelated, but I have been most impressed with the framework guys already adding two BIOS settings I love based on other peoples’ feedback (dimming the power led & max battery charge).

This sounds very promising!

I was very happy when they released the max battery charge BIOS enhancement so quickly. A very positive sign for future development. It was the most requested feature on the Framework community boards and they delivered it in a matter of months.

This may help:

  mem_sleep_default=deep

https://community.frame.work/t/ubuntu-21-04-on-the-framework...

Elevated Systems did a comprehensive setup guide a couple days ago. There are a some extra steps to go through, but it seems to work well with Ubuntu 21.10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jibqw5C3gk8&t=15m45s - timestamp to where he discusses fixing sleep issues

Thank you for link to the video. I watched the relevant part, where it's suggested to set pcie_aspm_on_bat=powersupersave. According to the Framework forums, this is not helping and people see 7-8W power consumption while in this "powersupersave" mode ([1]).

It sounds like the setting is there, but it does not work. Framework needs to fix that.

1. https://community.frame.work/t/issues-with-power-usage/12261

If you read the rest of that thread, you'll find the issue was resolved and it was not an issue with the laptop:

https://community.frame.work/t/issues-with-power-usage/12261...

> Issue was that I was running linux-zen, strangely. With linux-zen, the CPU wouldn’t get past C3 and idle power usage was 7-13W. With regular linux, the CPU reaches C8 and idle power usage is ~5W. Strange that linux-zen did that, but ok ig

The other main culprit is whether or not you can successfully enable PSR for the display. IIRC, the laptop cannot hit C8 or C10 sleep states without PSR enabled, even if you have the ASPM power saving mode enabled.

Speaking for myself, running Debian unstable, after lowering the display brightness, with the right settings my laptop easily hits 2.5-3W idle.

Nice! Thank you for extracting that. I missed it.

I'm still waiting on a display that will 2x nicely. Fractional scaling on Linux is not my idea of a good time. It's crazy, because they only need to add a couple hundred lines of resolution and it would be perfect.

>It's crazy, because they only need to add a couple hundred lines of resolution and it would be perfect.

To be fair, it's not Framework's fault that fractional scaling in Linux is not great.

True. But I also feel like 2x is inherently better than 1.7x. I'm not a graphics expert, but there's gotta be a reason Apple has stuck to 2x at all costs with every machine they've made for the last 8 years.

I’m not sure of what you meant but Apple supports fractional scaling since Retina screens appeared a decade ago. And it supports it really well. It’s absolutely not stuck at 2x.

Weirdly, X11 fractional scaling essentially does the same thing as Apple and works reasonably well, but Wayland's fractional scaling doesn't and looks like garbage as a result.

Last I checked, for fractional scaling, Apple was 2xing, then using the GPU to resize down. Could have changed by now though. Been a while since I took a look.

IIRC, you are right. But it works beautifully.

Except, I’m realizing it just now, it’s maybe why LibreOffice looks so bad on my Mac.

A buddy of mine once had a 4K monitor and was scaling it to 1.2 on his MacBook. Took him a while to realize that's why his fans were revving up all day long. haha

Seems like just telling apps to draw to a larger window is the way to go, which is why I don't understand why Apple and Wayland do it by scaling down an integer. Gotta be a good reason.

+1. I'm holding on buying a Framework laptop because I've heard that it does not support proper sleep. It would be great to hear if the issues with heating / losing battery when sleeping in a backpack are real or not.

There's 2 supported sleep modes, referred to as "s2idle" and "deep" in /sys/power/mem_sleep. My limited understanding is this:

- "s2idle" = S0ix and "deep" = S3

- S0ix is similar to how smartphones go to sleep by just idling everything and not actually sleeping. On the Framework it drains around 1 or 2% per hour (I haven't measured exactly.)

- S3 sleep is the more familiar suspend-to-RAM functionality. The power drain is significantly less than S0ix.

Both sleep modes work fine in Ubuntu 21.10 on my Framework. I actually have mine set to S0ix because while S3 sleep has less battery drain, it takes something like 10 seconds longer than S0ix to wake back up after opening the lid. And since I'm mostly working from home, the battery drain isn't an issue for me.

Still, the difference between the two is significant enough that I kind of wish there were separate menu options for both. Though I realize that having "sleep" and "deeper sleep" menu options is not the most user-friendly design.

Of course you can also get hibernate (i.e. suspend to disk and turn off power completely) running, but my understanding is that hibernate is currently incompatible with Secure Boot, since it's non-trivial to verify that the system is resuming with the same kernel as the original boot. So you have to choose which one you want, hibernate or SB.

Thank you for adding these details.

My current Linux laptop (released in 2015) can sleep for about week, resume in 3-4 seconds. Am I reading your comment correctly that buying a Framework would degrade my user experience?

Yes, at least from what I've experienced, you can have "resume in 2 seconds" or "sleep for a week" but not both. (S0ix and S3 respectively)

To be fair, I don't think this is Framework's fault. My understanding is that this is a limitation of the current generation of Intel CPUs, so pretty much any current-gen Intel-based computer will have the same issue.

> you can have "resume in 2 seconds" or "sleep for a week" but not both. (S0ix and S3 respectively)

The way Windows laptops do this is to go from light sleep to deep sleep after being idle for a long period. You should be able to pull off the same trick in Linux.

I would actually greatly appreciate such a feature. Essentially hybrid sleep except that the two types of sleep are different kinds of low power states instead of suspend to RAM and disk.

Yes. This is why I switched to simply hibernating, which has worked flawlessly for me. The shutdown and startup times are obviously a bit longer (it takes 10 seconds to get to the bootloader, after which its about 12 seconds to wake up), but since it's truly off, it can remain asleep indefinitely.

Does it really take only 3 seconds to resume from hibernate? That seems implausibly fast, faster than S3 resume.

Nope! I absolutely lied!

Decided to actually time it.

It's 10 seconds from power button to grub bootloader, then 12 seconds from bootloader to login screen.

I decided to run the same test coming out of S3, and it takes 14 seconds on my macine to go from power button to login screen.

So waking from hibernation is roughly 8 seconds slower, or approximately the time it takes to get to grub.

Do you have a link to a community thread or any other link on how to implement the hibernation? Right now, anytime I am closing the lid, the battery is draining out.

I just used the Arch wiki for basic setup:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_an...

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management#Suspend_an...

I have my machine set to suspend on lid close and hibernate on power button.

Unusable for me because it needs to be scaled fractionally. Unless they come out with a v2 which supports integer scaling, the laptop in its current form isn't worth buying if you don't like high input latency.

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