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The money quote IMO:

"I genuinely think the out-of-box experience of the Framework laptop is worse than anything I've ever seen in over a decade of Lenovo laptops. "

He does say he likes the laptop and doesn't think the issues he hit with 12th gen Intel should keep you from buying an 11th gen Framework.

On the other hand he's been a kernel dev for seven years and had to spend "ages debugging including building my own kernels with additional debugging as well as trying different firmware versions before giving up." He had issues with wifi, power management, brightness control, the GPU, "and my computer is locking up constantly." Oy.

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Frankly, I got a Lenovo T14 Gen 3, 12th gen Intel.

It's the worst laptop I've had in a decade.

They spent 6 months fixing an issue where two internal DP ports where visible to the driver which caused the kernel to not survive a suspend. The issue is with the Tigerlake reference design, and a lot of companies will need to push firmware updates to get things sorted out.

This is the upstream driver issue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/intel/-/issues/5531#note_...

Lenovo forum thread: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/Thinkpa...

EDIT:

I realized I'm typing this on the 11th gen Framework I own. While the Lenovo laptop is somewhere behind my couch, I think.

We must live in parallel universes. T15 gen 2 here, works phenomenally on ubuntu 20.04.

Same here, but I chose the AMD T14. Flawless.

You misunderstand. All the Lenovo laptops I've had are flawless. The issue is the 12th gen Intel board which you can select on some models.

This is actually an important comment, because it is about the same CPU in a different machine, which could help isolate the problem. The more interesting question is whether there's a general problem with Intel's 12th gen chips, because that will affect far more people than anything Framework does.

12th gen is just terrible in general. My Dell XPS 15 is a real turd. My old 7th gen intel is better. And my AMD one destorys it.

I've a laptop with a 12th gen and a nvidia gpu, works like a charm despite the configuration.

I don't think it has to do with intel.

> The issue is with the Tigerlake reference design

This. I have two T480 laptops that run Linux extremely well, but I have no intention of upgrading until Intel/Microsoft sort out their bullshit "modern standby" issues. Just let me fucking suspend.

Do contemporary/current-gen AMD laptops do "modern standby" or "traditional standby"?

I don't know about the very latest generation or about other OEMs, but my work laptop is a previous-generation (Ryzen 5xxx) AMD-equipped ThinkPad. It did "modern standby" by default but that can be flipped to S3 sleep in the BIOS settings.

My Ryzen 4000 laptop (Tong Fang PF5NU1G) had regular S3 suspend that worked reliably, but sadly it seems many Ryzen 5000+ models seem to have it stripped out (these can sometimes be added back in by loading patched ACPI tables [1]).

Oh, and for a bunch of Ryzen 6000 laptops it's been even more dire since they've also had s2idle issues that have only just gotten patched [2].

[1] https://www.cmi.ac.in/~ayannath/acpi-patching.html

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/More-s2idle-Rembrandt-Linux

I used company-provided dell/lenovo laptops for more than a decade. This isn't specific to the 12th gen intel version.

Intel GPU issues on linux were/[are?] omnipresent. Aside from a few lucky generations, for me it always took 1yr after obtaining a new laptop to resolve most of the issues. We go from random suspend issues related to the display not coming up, to massive framebuffer corruption when moving the hw cursor around making the display unusable without workarounds. The biggest issues usually get resolved within the first 2-6 months, but still it's extremely annoying for the absolutely most popular gpu in linux territory, and often quoted as "the best supported gpu" from a driver perspective too. I know intel employs a few full-time employees for this. Far too little apparently for a company of this size. First to get KMS, yet I couldn't ever get opencl working without their own custom/broken driver which is not even part of mesa, not to mention the amount of software that downrights blacklists intel drivers everywhere.

I'm on a T14 amd now. Can't say it's all rosey (it isn't), but I had next to zero issues on the GPU front with vega straight after getting it.

Eh - I threw Arch on it right away and it's been ROCK solid. No freezes, no wifi disconnects, running gnome/wayland without any hitches. All ports work fine, settings keys all work fine, basically - no issues at all.

Suspend even works relatively well, although I tend to turn on hibernate on lid close since modern laptops boot so quickly, and it entirely eliminates battery drain.

I'm also on the 12th gen intel version - None of these issues, so either OP isn't quite as good as he thinks he is, and borked a bunch of things... or the issues op hit are just "Ubuntu" related. Frankly - I like their server products but their consumer desktop releases have been dogshite since they dropped unity.

I'd go with basically any other distro at this point for a laptop device (popOS, Arch, Fedora, etc). It's sort of a shame, since Ubuntu was the distro that really focused on consumer support for a while - but they aren't that anymore, at least in my opinion (although again... they do good stuff server side, if only they would cut it out with forcing everything to snaps. I don't even mind snaps, I just want the option to do a real install)

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Long rant aside - it replaced a more expensive Dell XPS that was designed to work with Ubuntu (although I also ran Arch there). The Dell had some of the same issues OP complains about while running Ubuntu - so I would suggest he try something else.

I like mine a lot. I didn't have to think about it much. It just runs Arch well.

That does hit me a bit. I've been reluctant to use desktop linux again after I finally got tired of how often I'd have to repair everything after a few years of use. People on threads like this keep claiming that it's "better now" and you just have to "pick the right hardware". How are the odds of that working well when that's the experience with a community-favorite device advertised for compatibility?

The thinkpad T series (igpu only) issues will eventually get fixed. Lenovo puts in some minimal effort to fix these issues; they are just slow. The usual advice with laptops is to give things a year or two. So being on slightly older hardware usually works.

> He had issues with wifi, power management, brightness control, the GPU

Hmm I wonder what kernel version he was debugging. I've only had issues with the GPU and power management (very clearly due to the gpu); on latest releases of kernels 5.16 till 5.19.

"In the last 7 years of that time I've been a full-time Linux kernel developer. If I'm complaining about the amount of effort it took to make this laptop functional, then the average user is boned."

Same song and dance since 2006. Great only if you have no money and lots of time to learn and experiment.

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